Contrary to common belief, the name is not Scandinavian; it is simply two made-up words meant to look Scandinavian to American eyes. This is known in the marketing industry as foreign branding (and also similar to the heavy metal umlaut). Mattus included an outline of Denmark on early labels to reinforce the Scandinavian theme—Ironically, although Häagen-Dazs operates in 54 countries around the world, none of the company's 700 stores are in any Scandinavian country.

The playful spelling devices in the name invoke the spelling systems used in several European countries. "ä" (an 'a' with an umlaut) is used in the spelling of the German, Finnish, Slovak and Swedish languages, doubled vowel letters spell long vowels in Finnish, Dutch, and occasionally German; and zs corresponds to /ʒ/ (as in vision) in Hungarian. None of these spelling conventions is used in pronouncing the name of the American product, which has a short a, hard g, and a final s sound. The closest real name to the fake Häagen is the Danish/Norwegian Hagen (surname). Dazs could be a possible word in Hungarian due to the "zs" grapheme, but does not have any meaning and sounds unfamiliar even to be a name. The word is pronounciated almost similar to the Norwegian word "dass", a slang word for toilet.

A further step in branding is the renaming of the Teatro Calderón in Madrid, Spain to Teätro Häagen-Dazs Calderón^[1]. There is no ä in Spanish words.