Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably come across a new product category known as Dubai Chocolate. It's pretty much everywhere: at Starbucks, in ice cream shops, in grocery stores, and on restaurant menus.

I first came across it when I was shopping at Target. I walked past a display stand advertising Dubai Chocolate. I'm a fan of chocolate, so it immediately piqued my interest, but then I saw it was something like $16 for a single bar. I was like, WHAT, who would pay $16 for a bar of chocolate? I was so stunned by the price that I took a photo and sent it to my wife, remarking on how crazy it was. Here is the original photo

That was my first encounter with Dubai Chocolate. I didn't buy it, because it was too expensive. But then I started to see it pop up everywhere. And about a month later, a friend bought me some Dubai Chocolate, and I tasted it, and it was.... ok.

But I became fascinated by it because:

1. How did it become so popular so quickly? and
2. Why is it so expensive?

The expensive part is easy to understand, I guess. It's got the word Dubai associated with it, which automatically connotes something exotic and fancy. Most people know Dubai as a fancy city that rich people like to spend time in.

The rapid growth in popularity was a bit weird though. I felt very artificial. It went from something I had never heard of before, to something I was seeing everywhere.

Turns out, Dubai Chocolate is NOT something with a long cultural history, like Turkish Coffee or Belgian Waffles or Greek Yogurt. It is, in fact, a product that is only three years old, created in 2021 by a Filipino chef operating out of Dubai. Its rise in popularity is entirely the result of a successful viral social media campaign run by the company itself, who promoted influencers to promote the chocolate and taste it and camera.

Finding this out was not particularly surprising. Like anything associated with Dubai, it feels expensive, but tacky. But the virality of its rapid rise and the fact that people are blindly consuming it and paying mucho dinero for the privilege is kinda irksome to me. It makes me feel like people are getting "tricked" into consuming something much less fancy than it purports to be.

I asked Claude to give me other historical examples of viral marketing campaigns that got people to think something was a bit more fancy than it actually was, and surprisingly, I found out that Haagen-Dazs fits the bill! Here's Claude:

Great question — one of the best examples is Häagen-Dazs ice cream.

The brand was created in 1960 by Reuben Mattus, a Polish-born ice cream maker working out of the Bronx, New York. The name "Häagen-Dazs" is completely made up — it has no meaning in any language. Mattus invented a vaguely Scandinavian-sounding name to evoke an aura of Old World European craftsmanship and premium quality. He even put a map of Denmark on early cartons, despite the product having zero connection to Scandinavia.

The genius was in the positioning. At the time, ice cream in America was largely seen as a cheap, commodity product (think big tubs of Breyers or store brand). Mattus charged significantly more, used the foreign-sounding name, and marketed it as a luxury indulgence. It worked spectacularly — people genuinely believed it was some kind of imported European delicacy.

The product itself was good (higher butterfat content, fewer air whipped in, quality ingredients), but the "fanciness" was almost entirely a branding exercise. It was made in New Jersey. The name was gibberish. There was no centuries-old Danish recipe.

It's a nice parallel to Dubai chocolate: take something that's fundamentally a well-made version of an ordinary treat, wrap it in an exotic-sounding origin story and appealing aesthetics, and let perception do the heavy lifting. The difference is that Mattus had to rely on packaging and shelf placement in the pre-internet era, while Dubai chocolate had TikTok to do the work in a matter of weeks rather than decades.

The more you know, I suppose. Economics and human behavior can be kinda fun and interesting at times.