I guess I started a poo storm…

Last week I posted about what a great move it was for Trident Seafoods to start selling what I thought was Alaskan King Crab under the FV Northwestern brand at Walmart, which makes use of all the great advertising they get out of the Discovery Channel show “The Deadliest Catch.”

The post caught fire on the forums for the Bering Straits Bad Boys, Deadliest Forums (free registration required – thread is closed) and even the forum of the FV Northwestern, until it was pulled down. You see there’s one minor problem with the Northwestern Brand King Crab that is being sold at Walmart:

It’s Russian King Crab – not Alaskan.

You’ll get a better idea about the controversy from this thread on Bering Straits Bad Boys – the others have all closed or moderated the threads.

That means the only thing “Northwestern” about it is that the box has their name on it. So when we buy their crab to “support” them, who are we supporting?

My initial point was this: The Deadliest Catch has turned the product of the boats it features into a valuable commodity. We would pay more to be able to buy FV Northwestern, or FV Time Bandit King Crab, because we want to support these guys like we support Nascar drivers, etc. So they could literally charge a premium for their catch…

The one way to screw up in marketing is to let the customer see the man behind the curtain, to paraphrase from The Wizard of Oz.