Van Leeuwen and the art of not advertising.

We don’t advertise” is a common refrain I see in founder stories. It’s usually a way to communicate product quality. Our product is so good we didn’t have to advertise. Ads are expensive. So not advertising is an attractive business strategy. But just because you don’t advertise, doesn’t mean you don’t market. Every company needs some sort of customer acquisition strategy. It just doesn’t need to be advertising. In this case, the non-advertising brand is Van Leeuwen, an artisanal ice cream brand that started with a single cart in 2008 and now boasts 50 locations across the US, plus retail distribution in stores from WalMart to Whole Foods. Co-founder Ben Van Leeuwen started the brand as a way to offer ice cream made up of only simple, high quality ingredients. Fun fact: Van Leeuwen based his original formulation on an ice cream recipe from French chef <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Keller" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Thomas Keller</a> of Michelin starred Per Se and French Laundry. <img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:630/0*FrV5umDcPU72DsmX.png" style="height:735px; width:630px" /> Founders Ben, Pete, and Laura in their original ice cream truck. Source: Van Leeuwen A <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/10/how-van-leeuwen-built-a-300000-a-day-ice-cream-empire.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20marketing%20for%20the%20first,its%20high%2Dend%20artisanal%20flavors." rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">CNBC profile on Ben</a> noted that the brand has grown without spending any money on advertising. I checked on Facebook Ad library to confirm — I couldn’t help myself— and all that came up is a lonely ad that ran for 3 days in December 2019. Okay, so maybe Van Leeuwen really doesn’t advertise. <a href="https://bettermarketing.pub/how-to-scale-your-brand-without-ads-85adda9691af">Read More</a>