This pioneering research redefines the way we market ice cream. Artificial segmentations based on personality differences offer weak foundations on which to build brand strategies. To deeply engage us, a brand must have a solid inner architecture deeply rooted in the fundamentals of humanity. Beneath all the phantasmagoria of global marketing communication, lies order and rhythm, the source code of our human behaviour. Summarising the results of our research, this presentation analyses the fundamental motives underpinning consumer behaviour towards ice cream and proposes a way to build ice cream brands that engage people at a profoundly human level. Our fundamental human motives are like bare patterns in any language. Successful brands infuse the pattern, fertilising the basic forms, in a unique and profoundly human way, enabling people to experience deep patterns that make them feel alive. There is a direct correlation between our fundamental human motives, the most direct way to engage people, and the level of sales and profit. The efficiency of communication budgets is maximised when the authentic codes of the brand germinate the deepest motives driving sales and profit in the category. Today we have no excuse for saying that “we waste half of our advertising budget but we don’t know which half”.

1. CONNECT
CONTROL
The wheel of motives™
GROW
CARE
BALANCE
DESIRE
FEEL
SAFE
SEEK
PLAY
CREATE
DEFY
TRANSFORM
TM
ICE CREAM
BUYING
BEHAVIOUR

2. Hi! My name is Constantinos
Pantidos and I believe that
companies could improve
people’s lives even more
effectively if they had
deeper human insight.

3. Using a multidisciplinary
approach, BRAND AVIATORS™
has captured and presents, for
the first time, the fundamental
human motives underpinning
our consumer behaviour
towards ice cream at the
deepest levels of their
deployment …

4. … all the way from:
• their biological value
• to the neurosystems they engage
• to the cognitive operations and
psychological states they activate
• to the major social reinforcers they
cause and
• to the rich hierarchy of inherent
concepts they infuse into our
everyday life.

5. This methodology helps
marketers develop
Intrinsically Engaging
Narratives™

6. The motives are presented in
order of increasing relative
importance in line with their
power to influence our buying
decisions.

7. CARE: On an initial level of
motivation, by offering ice
cream we demonstrate our
care. As a treat, ice cream
represents tenderness and
affection.

8. Ice cream acts as a substitute for the sweet experience, as substitute
for love. Held in its mother’s arms, the new-born not only receives
good nutrition as it suckles but is completely nurtured. It is being
touched, loved, sung to, spoken to, and cared for in a way that is
experienced only once in a lifetime. In an ideal world parents would
have enough time and energy to fill their children with love. But in a
love deprived world we learn to seek love in material form.

9. TOGETHERNESS: More significantly, ice cream
is ordinary, democratic, convivial. It has the
capacity to bring people together.

10. Ice cream’s sharing builds and cements
relationships. All classes have access to ice
cream. Studies demonstrate that when we
interact with someone who eats sugary food,
we are likely to perceive that person as being
nicer, more genial. Eating sweet things
releases endorphins which regulate the need
for closeness. Eating an ice cream is often a
substitute for company.

11. IMPETUS. Ice cream is
strong and substantial, it is
performance. Milk is our
primal food. Sugar is a fuel
producing heat and energy
and the primary energy
source for brain cells.

12. Ice cream cools our
throat, injects sugar into
the pancreas and boosts
our activity levels. Its
basic function is to
increase the life of the
individual.

13. TRANSFORMATION: The experience of
ice cream begins with a shock. Ice cream
transforms us into statues in less than no
time the first time we taste it and every
time afterwards it makes us stand
awestruck at its powerful workings. First
we sense a paralysis of our mouth and
then its flavor. As our oral temperature
changes, we receive a blast, a mild
electroshock. The tantalizing transition
from solidity to fluidity in our mouth
makes ice cream probably the most
enthralling food found.

14. Ice-crystals, air bubbles, fat
droplets and sugar
solutions, create the
microstructure that gives
the sensory manifestation
of the texture we
experience as ice cream.

15. Ice cream is a powerful
healer that restores vigor, a
sensory illusion, a tromple
d’oeil that turns exuberant
people into innocent angels.

16. What ice gets, ice holds forever. Ice
cream stops time and prolongs it. It
escapes time and yet it can reenter
reality at any moment. Through ice
cream people manage to reduce the
dominance that space and time holds
over us. Ice cream is uncanny, mystical,
ghostly, unearthly. In contact with the
air it emits vapour. It makes seasons
appear as pseudo-events. Summer
now can last forever.

17. SENSUALITY: On a deeper level, in
ice cream the mind creates an
epitome of oral voluptuousness.
Ice cream chills off and cools
down, but unlike sex, it is
insatiable. Its texture is of a
velvety, dense, rich and smooth
body: firm but melting.

18. The preferred form is rounded by means
of the scoop, anyone with experience
would want to lick it, breast-shaped with
a neat, inviting skirt - the ragged edge
which often forms where a round scoop
of ice cream rests on the cone.
By adding chocolate sauce we increase
pleasure even more. Sucking and licking
it, we are fairly uninhibited when we eat
ice cream. We often touch the food with
the tip of the tongue, where there is a
high concentration of our taste buds for
sweetness, and that gives us an extra jolt
of pleasure.

19. PLAYFULNESS: Ice cream is
vivid, intense, bright. The
mood picks up following the
humor of the palate. There is
no other known way of
reviving the spirit so quickly.

20. Its antidepressant effect and
unique character come mainly
from the brief change in topical
body temperature that humans
had been accustomed to for
thousands of years but is rarely
experienced today. Because of
its gooey, creamy, messy
satisfaction, ice cream can create
an exuberant disarray.

21. Ice cream may be flavoured
outlandishly, covered in
chocolate, sold on a stick like a
lollipop; Its flavors are intensified
to overcome the coldness of ice
bright colors. We have to eat it
while we can because soon it will
melt away to nothing. Temporary
like life itself, it urges us to hold it,
share it, and enjoy it to the full
during its brief moment out of the
freezer.

22. ESCAPE: Moving closer to the motives
that dominate the category, ice-
cream melts rapidly in the mouth. A
ruthless cycle of chilling and
warming is established which
alternate the experience sending a
vertigo to the mind. Ice cream easily
leads itself to novelty. Our brain has
a craving for novelty, which
produces a thrilling effect through
the release of endorphins. Novel
stimuli cause the release of the
neurotransmitter noradrenaline. Our
body reacts and our emotions are
exalted.

23. SUBVERSION: Due to its
repercussions, ice cream is the
most prohibited among sweets.
The violence of the cold
suddenly changes the balanced
system of the body. When
people die they turn cold. The
first time we eat it, we are
scared to death: When the cold
ice cream touches the roof of
the mouth a nerve response
causes rapid constriction and
swelling of blood vessels. An ice
cream headache also known as
brain freeze is produced.

24. Ice cream has an addictive
capacity. It contains casein
which creates morphine-like
effects. Ice cream comes to
symbolise uninhibited
overindulgence, something
we cannot do without, a
kind of obsession. Ice cream
eating breaks all rules of
ritual and formality. And
we want more of that
which is forbidden.

25. SECURITY: On the innermost level of
human motivation, the heavenly
treat expresses cold comfort in
every bite. Ice cream tops the list of
comfort foods to represent instant
happiness, edible nostalgia,
nameless felicity, blissful calm, pure
delight in portable packaging. It is
cold but makes us feel warm inside.
Ice cream consoles, offers
psychological roundness, becalms
and soothes difficulties.

26. Chilled desserts stimulate brain
regions responsible for feelings
of pleasure and joy, and
affect immediately and directly
the parts of the brain that
control mood.

27. Ice cream is the apotheosis of milk and of
progenital innocence. The first ice cream
was flavored snow. Milk replaced snow.
The crisp, sharp, frozen blast (as opposed
to the heat of hell), refreshes, purifies,
clears the palate, the guilt, the sins.
Clears. Like a cold shower, a little fresh
air in summer, ice cream takes us almost
out of our mind, ready to cry for joy. Ice
cream is effortless food. We do not eat
an ice cream. We swallow it. Ice cream
implies fullness and richness not inherent
in any other kind of food. Ice cream is a
symbol of abundance.

28. Because of its familiarity and
the recollection of childhood
times of vacation when life
was simple, ice cream makes
us feel young and safe.

29. All traditional sellers of ice cream are
outfitted in snappy white uniforms and crisp
caps, and their vehicles also in sparkling
white and fitted out with bells project
unalloyed wholesomeness and purity. Cows,
emerald green grass, and churns, are often
used in advertising to activate nostalgia for
the countryside. The absence of spoons
recalls the mother’s breast.

30. What a gleam in the eyes of
the child who has just been
given permission to have an
ice cream! And what an
ecstatic moment when the
child is finally allowed to
lick it! Melting itself can also
be an allegory for the
inevitable passage of time.

31. This map
illustrates the
way some
leading brands in
the ice cream
business are
positioned in the
consumers’ mind

32. Successful brands
coherently express
the fundamental
human motives
driving their
category

33. BRAND AVIATORS™ are trusted by some of the world’s
leading companies:

34. (Re)define your brand through the
human fundamentals if you seek to:
• Deeply engage people locally
and across cultures
• Develop genuine concepts that
work year after year after year
• Align all brand communications
under one master idea
• Increase the ROI of all your
brand activities

35. My mission is to help clients
around the world build
brands that liberate the very
forces of life. Contact me now
for a free discovery audit by
clicking on the icon: