Courtesy / Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative
Marianne LaCroix
Updated: April 23, 2021
Marketing group partners with Kennebunkport hotel to promote Maine lobster
Courtesy / Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative
The Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative has numerous promotional partnerships underway, including one with a Kennebunkport hotel, to market the product and the fishery’s sustainability.
A new partnership between the lobster industry’s marketing group and a Kennebunkport hotel aims to promote the crustacean's popular appeal as well as the industry’s sustainable practices.
The Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative and the Boathouse Waterfront Hotel have opened the “Maine Lobster Suite,” which features a guest room with lobster-themed décor and furnishings such as lobster trap rocking chairs and Grundens fishing bibs. Guests also receive a hotel package that includes lobster-themed menus and a lobster cruise, and various promotional perks.
The promotion takes place from May 26 to Oct. 3, to coincide with the fishery’s peak season, which runs from roughly June to October in Maine, Marianne LaCroix, the collaborative’s executive director, said in a news release.
The hotel is part of group of local lodgings called the Kennebunkport Resort Collection.
"Developing a partnership with the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative has been the perfect opportunity to celebrate a cornerstone of Maine's heritage while also bringing attention to the important role sustainability plays in our state's lobster legacy," said the collection’s managing director, Justin Grimes.
LaCroix told Mainebiz by email that the idea to create a lobster-themed hotel suite came about before the pandemic, originally as part of the collaborative’s 2020 planning process.
Lifestyle publications
The idea, she said, was to generate positive stories about Maine lobster in consumer lifestyle publications.
“We tabled the idea when the pandemic hit, but knew that more people would be looking for really unique travel experiences this year,” she said. “Kennebunk Resort Collection was the ideal partner because they wanted to create a lobster get-away at one of their properties.”
The project is a low-cost way to get media attention, she added. The collaborative contributed advice and expertise, gift certificates, and furniture and decorations from its own stockpile.
“Our goal is to educate people about the Maine lobster fishery and to inspire them to eat more lobster,” she said. “Two days after announcing the suite, we have already garnered over 680 million media impressions in top-tier consumer lifestyle publications, including Food & Wine and Travel & Leisure. The articles highlight important messages about Maine lobster, including its sweet flavor and sustainability.”
Media impressions are the number of people who have the opportunity to see an article.
“If you think about it from a traditional print magazine standpoint, you would look at the number of magazines sold to determine how many people might have seen an article,” LaCroix said. “You would know the number sold, but can’t guarantee that everyone that bought the magazine actually read your article. It’s similar for online impressions.”
The lobster suite promotion, for example, first garnered online articles in Food & Wine and Travel & Leisure.
Both of those articles were picked up in several Yahoo! sites, including its news and entertainment sites, among others, she said. The sites "really drove the number of impressions in this case because they have such broad views. We can determine the views for each of these sites, and know the number of people that had the opportunity to read these articles.”
There is also additional coverage because some of the sites shared the article through their social media platforms.
However, since sales are handled by individual private companies within the industry, it’s not possible to tie sales figures to individual media stories, she added.
Expanded reach
Working with other organizations helps the collaborative expand its reach and budget, LaCroix explained.
“Often this involves running educational programs for target groups that come to Maine, like the International Corporate Chefs Association and ChefsFeed,” she said.
International Corporate Chefs Association is includes food service professionals from the nation’s largest companies and ChefsFeed is a media company focused on food and drink, according to their websites.
The collaborative also regularly works with Food Export-Northeast to develop international marketing materials promoting lobster. Food Export-Northeast is a nonprofit created in 1973 as a cooperative effort between 10 Northeastern state agricultural promotion agencies and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service, according to its website.
“This winter we connected them with a Maine lobsterman to develop a video about lobstering that has turned out to be their most popular video,” LaCroix said.
Product innovation
One of the collaborative’s big initiatives this year is product innovation, she said.
“We’re partnering with a product development team to create new packaged product concepts featuring the underutilized lobster mince, the flavor-packed bits of meat that come out of the body and tail fins during processing,” she said.
“We used consumer research to uncover opportunities for increasing lobster consumption among consumers and to inspire these concepts.”
The collaborative plans to share the research and the new product concepts with the industry through a webinar in June.
In addition, the collaborative is working with influencers to develop and promote more than 20 new Maine lobster recipes with photography and video “that we will use to inspire consumers to cook with lobster throughout the year,” she said.
In February, the collaborative reported good results after a quick marketing pivot to focus on home cooks and grocery store sales in 2020, with a surge in media impressions and website traffic compared with 2019.
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