Ben & Jerry's

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield's friendship began in an unlikely place: PE class. Both were terrible runners, forced to walk behind everyone else during the mile run. Years later, when Jerry was rejected from medical school for the 20th time—cycling through reapplication after reapplication—he reconnected with Ben. They realized they had almost nothing in common except one shared memory: they'd both worked as ice cream scoopers during school. With no other prospects and a $5 correspondence course from Penn State under their belts (which they famously split the cost on, paying $250 each), they decided to start an ice cream company.

With $12,000 from friends and family, they bought an ice cream shop in Vermont. But timing was brutal—they opened in the dead of winter. Nobody wanted ice cream in freezing Vermont. Sales were nonexistent, equipment was failing, and inventory was literally melting on the shelves every day. Desperate, they launched a goofy marketing campaign called APOPCDBWE (A Penny Off Per Celsius Degree Below Zero Winter Extravaganza)—for every degree below zero, you got a penny off ice cream. It was just enough to survive the season.

Realizing nobody would come to their shop, Ben had an idea. He loved driving and listening to music. He packed pints of ice cream into jars and drove them to nearby restaurants and convenience stores. Demand was surprisingly high. Soon they had distributors throughout Vermont, then Boston. In one Boston store, Ben & Jerry's became the most popular ice cream brand. The pints were flying off shelves.

But Pillsbury had a problem with their success. The multinational corporation owned Haagen-Dazs (which they'd bought for $70 million) and noticed Ben & Jerry's was outselling it in Boston. Their solution: strong-arm store owners into signing exclusive agreements, threatening to cut off all Pillsbury products if they didn't drop Ben & Jerry's. This could have destroyed the young brand.

Instead, Ben and Jerry turned it into their biggest growth driver. They launched the "What's the Dough Boy Afraid Of?" campaign—billboards, bus ads, and a Rolling Stone advertisement showing the Pillsbury Dough Boy strangling a pint of Ben & Jerry's, asking "What's the Dough Boy Afraid Of?" They created a 1-800 hotline where callers heard the David vs. Goliath story and could request mailing kits to send to Pillsbury. Jerry himself protested outside Pillsbury headquarters in Minneapolis. They turned the narrative into "Two Vermont Hippies Fighting Corporate Giants."

The campaign went viral before viral was a thing. The New Yorker and Wall Street Journal picked it up. Distributors everywhere wanted to stock the brand that was bold enough to take on Pillsbury. The PR firestorm was exactly what they needed.

Ben & Jerry's grew from a failing winter ice cream shop to a household name, eventually acquired by Unilever for $326 million. The lesson: when adversity strikes, don't just limit the damage. Ask yourself how to turn misfortune into fortune.