Cold Stone Creamery, with more than 1,200 locations, is committed to providing customers with the Ultimate Ice Cream Experience®. Each franchise offers ice cream lovers fresh, smooth and creamy flavors and an unlimited amount of ice cream creations, while store crew members share real enthusiasm for their work and sing for tips. Although Cold Stone Creamery is well-known for its ice cream, few are aware of its other area of expertise: ice cream cakes.

Cold Stone Creamery’s ice cream cakes, with their moist cake, creamy ice cream and rich fudge ganache recipe or light fluffy frosting, are the ideal choice for elegant dinner parties, festive celebrations or day-to-day occasions. The challenge, however, was to leverage these cakes as the first choice for party planners and cake lovers.

Strategy:
Cold Stone Creamery relies on Landis Communications Inc. (LCI) for creative public relations strategies and big ideas. For the 2005 winter promotion, Cold Stone Creamery wanted a fun, media-pleasing theme to promote its ice cream cakes. LCI suggested a promotion playing off traditional holiday season fruitcake. Specifically, LCI helped Cold Stone Creamery capitalize on the public’s general dislike of fruitcake by dreaming up and launching the Fruitcake Freedom initiative. This initiative asked customers to turn in their dreaded fruitcakes in return for a $5 coupon off of one of Cold Stone’s ice cream cakes, the alternative to the fruitcake.

Tactics:
LCI began the Fruitcake Freedom promotion by sending a targeted pitch, press release and fruitcake facts and tips sheet to local and national print, television and radio media. LCI then conducted heavy outreach to the selected media targets and coordinated interviews and taste tests of Cold Stone Creamery holiday cakes. LCI also targeted local "fruitcake tosses" and holiday promotions for product drops and the involvement of local franchisees.

Results:
The Fruitcake Freedom initiative garnered significant attention for Cold Stone Creamery’s ice cream cake program in regional and national publications, including the Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, Denver Post and Seattle Weekly. Overall, LCI earned more than 10 million gross media impressions for the Fruitcake Freedom promotion.