The newest representation of Bristol Bay sockeye is a seven-sided geometrical shape with a single-line salmon head inside it.
Bristol Bay has the world’s largest sockeye run, but outside of Alaska, not everyone has heard the name. This week, the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association is launching a marketing campaign in Boulder, Colo. to try and build a brand name.
The new Bristol Bay sockeye logo is modern, a seven-sided geometrical shape with a single-line salmon head in it. Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association executive director Becky Martello described it as bold.
“I think that the lines of the logo evoke the feeling of a fish going through a gillnet, perhaps," she said. "I think of it as a stamp. When I see it on things, it looks like a stamp of origin.”
The logo is one piece of the marketing campaign that the RSDA is hoping will make Bristol Bay sockeye a recognizable brand, like Copper River. There's also a website, and marketing efforts in Boulder, to start. The association worked with Alaska ad firm Rising Tide Communications to develop the logo.
“It went through a couple different revisions, and we tried some different looks, but this is the one we finally settled on, and really like that it’s bold," Martello said. "We feel like it really makes a statement and stands out when compared to a lot of other seafood brands. Really what we’re going for is an origin stamp in the end, so that people can co-brand it, put it on different sorts of products and really it’ll make a statement without competing with other maybe direct marketers or processing brands, that sort of thing.”
The new logo is printed on seafood wrapping paper to send fish home from grocery stores, on mugs for in-store promotions, and even on the signs that go in cold cases at the store. But the campaign is more than just a logo. It's designed to reach consumers, retailers and chefs.
“We have some point of sale materials like some new beautiful recipe posters that we developed, some beautiful food photograph," Martello said. "We’re also doing some consumer-type promotions, where there’ll be some give aways in the store. And we’ll be doing some workshops down there, teaching people how to cook it. We also have a partnership with chefs collaborative as well. So we’re trying to reach the chef community and get on menus and in restaurants there. So we’re doing a series of events with them, a public dinner, a workshop for chefs, and a restaurant week for Bristol Bay sockeye.”
The marketing campaign will run all fall, and primarily targets millenials - adults ages 19 to 35. At the end of the year, the RSDA will review the effort, and if it’s a success, look at launching it in other markets.
So far, Martello said the logo has been on social media, and the response has been good.
“The feedback has been really, really positive, and people really seem to be liking it," she said. "So we’re really excited and happy about that.”
Drift fisherman Michael Jackson said that while he has some concerns about whether it should be the association's job to work on marketing fish in the long-term and whether benefits to processors would trickle down to the fleet, he was glad to see the effort being made for now.
"The marketing campaign in Boulder is the first real effort the RSDA has put into marketing our Sockeye," he said. "The demographics of Boulder seem to align directly with the RSDA's goal of reaching millennials, so this sales program seems to be set up to succeed."
