Raising Awareness of Commercial Fishing with Quality Seafood:
Best Marketing Practices in South Atlantic Fishing Communities
Survey & Related Findings from the Study:
Assessing and Developing Best Practices in Seafood Marketing and Consumption*
Executive Summary
David Griffith
Institute for Coastal Science and Policy
Department of Anthropology
East Carolina University
and
Sara Mirabilio
North Carolina Sea Grant
Extension Program
September 2012
*Funded by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Saltonstall-Kennedy Program;
Grant # NA10NMF4270196.
Raising Awareness of Commercial Fishing with Quality Seafood:
Best Marketing Practices in South Atlantic Fishing Communities
Executive Summary
This document reports on over a year of research on seafood marketing and commercial
fishing in ten ports along the South Atlantic Coast of the United States, ranging from northern
North Carolina to Southern Georgia. The study’s central focus was on seafood marketing and
promotional best practices, paying particular attention to those practices that forged a deeper
relationship between seafood consumers and local fishing communities. The research included
interviews with commercial fishermen and their family members, with people involved in
seafood handling, further processing, and marketing, and with others, such as Sea Grant marine
advisory personnel, who have played a role in the seafood industry in the region. We
combined these interviews with surveys of seafood consumers and seafood specialists, such as
chefs in seafood restaurants and owners of seafood markets. During our fieldwork in these
ports we also attended seafood festivals, observed methods of handling and marketing seafood,
collected background information on the fisheries, and witnessed the landing, packing,
processing, and selling of fresh fish and shellfish.
The promotion and effective marketing of local seafood is critical to the defense of
commercial fishing in the South Atlantic against the many challenges facing the industry. These
challenges include the loss of fish houses and other infrastructure that support commercial
fishing; rising fuel, dock rents, and other input costs; increasing threats of recreational fishing
and conservation organizations to ban or modify gear types and prevent commercial fishing of
some species or in some areas; coastal development and corresponding higher property taxes;
pollution events from energy extraction and industry; the loss of wetlands and other nursery
areas; and ever more restrictive fishery management. These multiple challenges to commercial
fishing threaten not only the industry but continued consumer access to fresh, high quality,
wild caught, local seafood. With reduced access to local seafood, consumers are likely to be
forced to rely on farm-raised fish and shellfish or seafood imported from foreign fishing fleets—
seafood that is often produced under environmentally destructive conditions with labor that is
highly vulnerable to exploitation.
Against such a trying setting, it should come as little surprise that commercial fishing
families across the Carolinas and Georgia, ever resilient, have developed several innovative
methods of promoting the local catch, including developing new marketing strategies and
educational campaigns. Our findings highlight many of these while also showing the many
ways that consumers have been responding to these developments. Principal among our
findings are:
1. Five of the six species listed as favorites (shrimp, oysters, scallops, crab, and flounder)
are locally available species. Shrimp is clearly the most preferred species, with over 60%
listing it as their favorite seafood.
2. Consumers tend to stick with seafood they know rather than experiment with new
seafood, yet their knowledge of seafood tends to be confined to how it tastes, where it is
caught, and how it has been handled (fresh, frozen, processed, etc.).
3. Seafood specialists are most knowledgeable about where the seafood they sell was
caught, and the majority of specialists educate both their employees and their
consumers about the seafood they sell, telling them, for example, where it was caught,
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how it was handled, how it tastes, what fleet caught it, and whether or not it is
sustainable.
Both consumers and specialists prefer seafood brand logos that refer to specific places,
such as Brunswick County or Ocracoke, that depict fishing gear and fishermen, that
emphasize fresh seafood, and that are relatively simple in design, without including
detailed information.
Local, healthy, and wild are three descriptors that consumers and specialists prefer to see
in association with the seafood they consume or sell, as are fresh and fresh-frozen. By
contrast, descriptors that made less of an impact were sustainable, organic, farm-raised,
vacuum-packed, and processed.
The two most common methods that specialists add value to seafood are through its
presentation and placing an emphasizing high quality (its freshness, its capture in clean
water, its status as a wild product, etc.).
Factors that are likely to lead to an increase in seafood consumption are news of
seafood’s health benefits, a recommendation for seafood (or a specific species) by word
of mouth, and news that the seafood being consumed is sustainable.
Factors that are likely to lead to a decrease in seafood consumption are news of polluted
waters, news of health risks of eating seafood, government consumption advisories, and
recommendation against seafood (or a specific species) by word of mouth.
Both consumers and specialists in the ports we visited have positive views of local
commercial fishing fleets, viewing fishermen as providing high quality food products,
contributing to local heritage and tradition, and acting as stewards over marine
resources. Most also acknowledge that local commercial fishing communities face
several challenges from imported seafood, fisheries management, and other sources.
Both consumers and specialists in the ports we visited have positive views about
purchasing local seafood, viewing it as contributing to the local economy and helping
one’s neighbors. Most also acknowledge that seafood restaurants and retail markets
need to rely on imported seafood during at least part of the year.
Eight methods of promoting seafood are common across the South Atlantic: a)
emphasizing seafood as local; b) emphasizing seafood as an artisanal product, caught by
fishing families; c) exploring alternative sales venues, such as social media or farmers’
markets; d) performance promotions, or showcasing seafood at festivals, blessings of
fleets, and other events; e) creating or enhancing a seafood trademark or brand; f)
adding value to seafood through further processing; g) adding value to seafood through
educational or symbolic means; and h) attempting to forge or deepen fishermenconsumer relationships.
We discuss these finding in more detail below, seating them in a more general discussion of the
marketing and promotion of foods and the implications of these practices for coastal
communities and, especially, the South Atlantic commercial fishing industry. These findings
are being distributed in several forms across the region in hopes of enhancing the interest in
seafood and in commercial fishing traditions and heritage. Commercial fishing families remain
vital to the health of coastal economy and society. The many threats to their ability to provide
high quality, flavorful, and low-fat seafood to consumers have been counter-balanced, in part,
by the concerns of thousands of coastal residents across the Carolinas and Georgia for whom
enjoying seafood is a basic human right.