Verlasso’s Scott Nichols named Seafood Marketer of the Year

Beginning in 2008, we began the activities that led to our branding. We knew that it was through the brand that we would tell our story and have the conversation with people. We began our branding work with a group called Addis Creson (a brand building ad agency). We worked with them to take forward our very clear vision of what we wanted to do. With everything, the WHY came first, WHAT came second and HOW came third. The progression is really important. It keeps us grounded in the foundational values that led us want to start this in the first place. With Addis Creson, we developed our logo and name, but most importantly, we agreed on what brand personality should be. This clarity means that all of us within Verlasso are responsible for representing that and doing it properly and taking the message forward carefully so were consistent when we talked to people.

Ok. Where do you go next, to buyers?

We started having conversations with chefs, for the most part, and with small retailers as well. One of the things that my colleagues and I did was, beginning about a year before we launched, we would go out of town a week or more a month. We’d go to a city and visit 10 grocery stores a day, four days in a row. I would just stand at the fish counter, and I would ask shoppers why they chose this, that or the other thing. When nobody was there, I talked to the counter manager. We would just grab ourselves a cappuccino and walk around the store. We developed a shorthand for ourselves to try and draw correlations between other offerings and the seafood counter. So, a store that sold more than seven kinds of peppers was usually a store that was going to have a really complete fish counter. Anybody who had a full line of specialty cheeses usually had a very full seafood counter. The person who would want to have more than seven choices of peppers on their kitchen counter is also the person who would go up to the seafood counter buy a piece of fish and cook it.

full article on Seafood International Digital