Trident Seafoods marketing “fun and easy” seafood to millennials

Millennials are on the mind of John Salle, Trident Seafoods senior vice president of marketing, innovation and corporate accounts.

Selling to a new generation of consumers requires new strategies and new products, and Trident and its surrogate, Louis Kemp, have embraced the challenge head-on.

“We have an established brand but new consumers. We asked ourselves, ‘How do we respond to that?’ And we searched very seriously for the right answer to that question,” Salle said.

On Sunday,6 March at Seafood Expo North America, Trident launched a new campaign targeted at millennials with the slogan “Fish, for compliments,” which highlights the “wow” factor of serving seafood.

“We wanted to highlight seafood as the most compliment-generating protein,” Salle said.

In conjunction with the program launch, Trident’s introduced new products targeted specifically for millennials designed to define Trident and Louis Kemp seafood as an easy, fun and impressive food that young people can enjoy alone as a snack or together at social events. The new fiesta salmon bites have proved popular, as have their Alaskan Pollock burgers. In its Louis Kemp’s Crab Delights line, it has introduced sriracha filled seafood rolls, packaged and shaped like string cheese, and snack kit tubs with cocktail sauce.

Trident also started pushing “fresh” and “seasonal” in its marketing, highlighted by the addition of season recipes on some of its packaging. On the food service side, Trident introduced “15 genius fish on Friday hacks,” offering recipes such as Korean fish sandwich and fries, sauce fish pops, smokin’ fish tacos and peanut butter and jellyfish served with chips.

The rebrand is bold new step for Trident, but it’s one that John Salle was necessary for the company to make inroads with younger generations.

“We haven’t done anything like this in the past, where we’re so focused on the needs of the consumer,” Salle said. “We realized that we have to change the way we get to market to attract this new generation.”