“New-shells” Starred in Marketing Initiative

By Laurie Schreiber

ROCKPORT—Maine’s new-shell, or soft-shell, lobsters are the focus of a new marketing initiative intended to expand markets and boost value.

New-shell lobsters are those that have molted out of their old, hard shells and are in the process of growing new, larger shells.

“That’s obvious to you, not so obvious to people from away,” said Weber Shandwick executive vice president of strategy Joe Frydl. “It means we have new news to share.”

Weber Shandwick is the global marketing firm recently hired by the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative (MLMC), which succeeds the Maine Lobster Promotion Council. New marketing initiatives are fueled by a larger budget funded by increased surcharges on lobster harvester and dealer/processor licenses. In 2014, the new MLMC, established by the state legislature, had a budget of $750,000. That doubled for 2015, and will go up to about $2.2 million annually for the following two years, when the program must be reviewed by the legislature. By contrast, the promotion council’s budget was less than $400,000 in its final year.

Weber Shandwick executive vice president Patty Stone, food expert Michael Wehman, and Frydl shared their ideas for the new initiative at the Maine Fishermen’s Forum in early March.

“It’s not about demand for lobster generically,” said Frydl. “Demand overall is healthy. People like lobster. We need to talk about Maine lobster specifically. We want to build our brand. We want to do that at the right time of year.”

The meat of new-shell lobster is considered better than hard-shell lobster—sweeter and more tender. New-shells appear seasonally, and seasonality is an important driver these days among restaurants, Frydl said. Also important is “protein provenance.”

“When you go to the supermarket , you see faceless pork. You look at the pork under the Saran wrap and it’s not from anywhere,” he said. “Same with chicken and beef. But the moment you attach a place name to it, it starts to mean something important. You know it’s not an indeterminate, factory-raised, bland thing.”

While seasonality and provenance are trendy, they have to translate into something meaningful for diners eating the food, he said.

“We need to position Maine new-shell lobster as a seasonal delicacy,” he said.

For the start, Frydl said, the agency will focus outreach on a small group of chefs who influence the wider restaurant scene, with the idea of expanding the northeast market.

“There’s a handful of people with a big influence of culinary trends” he said. “These chefs care a lot about seasonality and provenance.”

Maine must distinguish itself from competitive pressures, Frydl said. He cited Alaska as a model for “juggernaut” fishing and marketing. “They’re big, they’re efficient, it’s all about uniformity throughout the year, and they may or may not be sustainable,” he said. “What does that mean for us? We have to be what they can never be. If you can’t fix it, feature it. We’re small. That’s good.” Maine lobster fishing is “deliberately inefficient. We’re going to turn that into a positive when it comes to marketing. It has very much to do with being sustainable and seasonably special.”

The idea of provenance, he said, is about a sense of place and a way of life, “the small towns and communities behind this industry, deliberately inefficient, and probably the oldest sustainable fishery in the entire world.”

People outside of Maine love eating lobster, but they tend to think of it generically, he said. “There’s a whole other level of lobster we want to generate excitement about. How does that translate into strategy? The lobster we all know is delicious. But there’s a certain time of year when people who live in Maine get especially excited about eating lobster. From June to November, lobster in the cold, clear waters shed their old shells and grow new ones. That’s when their meat is at its sweetest, most tender, most ‘lobstery.’ Maine new shells—everything else is just lobster.”

Wehman said the strategy includes educating chefs about the product’s seasonality and taste difference, as well as getting Maine lobster featured on menus in innovative ways.

“We want to inspire chefs with the superiority of lobster as an ingredient,” Wehman said. “If we can get more people exposed to lobster as an ingredient in restaurants, that’s going to influence consumers.” The strategy includes expanding a partnership that began developing in 2014 with the Culinary Institute of America, as well as communications at key trade shows and through trade media.

MLMC executive director Matt Jacobson said that hiring Weber Shandwick produced considerable interest across the country.

“My email box started filling up,” Jacobson said. “We had offers from the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Chicago Cubs. They’re all willing to take our money to do a lobster promotion.” But that sort of thing isn’t in the offing right now. “We’ve got to make sure it fits with this strategy and not be chasing what looks like a cool opportunity.”

“It’s about making the dollar work hard,” said Frydl. “If you think, ‘Let’s go bigger,’ that money has to be dispersed much more thinly, so the impact you can have diminishes. We want to go for the good, smart, easy, solid wins. This is about building the right kind of momentum.”

Jacobson noted there will be more money to expand the geography once the foundation work is done.

One fisherman wanted to know if the strategy was about moving the harvest’s “weakest stuff.”

“There needs to be a shift about what is ‘weakest stuff,’” responded Jacobson. In the past, he said, “We’ve measured quality based on hardness of the shell, because it’s easier to transport. That has nothing to do with taste. The people actually eating the lobster, their quality measure is very different from what our quality measure has been. So I think we need to change our definition of quality” to mean “there is a product, shedders, that are a lot better-tasting than hard shells, and a lot easier to work with.”