Marketing: It's what's for dinner

Are you a fan of Patagonian toothfish? Thanks to outstanding marketing and branding, there is a very real chance that anyone who’s had great seafood at a high-end restaurant has eaten it at least once — and paid top dollar for it.

You probably just didn’t know it.

How could you? It's not like Patagonian toothfish is on the menu. Any menu. Anywhere.

When you hanker for a little toothfish, whether from your favorite seafood restaurant or dockside fish monger, you have to call it by its brand name: Chilean seabass.

It turns out that your o-so-fancy Chilean seabass is actually a deep ice water cod. Yes, cod — the same fish you’ll find battered and deep fried at Long John Silver's (for far, far less money).

Back in 1977, fish wholesaler Lee Lantz had his hands full, trying to unload a bunch of this toothy monster that kept getting caught in the local nets. Not surprisingly, nobody wanted to buy — let alone pay top dollar for — Patagonian toothfish. Lantz needed to come up with a way to change that.

It took a while — til 1994, in fact — before the FDA formally agreed with Lanz. But suddenly Chilean seabass started turning up on menus.

I’ll bet you thought you were eating some kind of geographically-based, fancy seafood from, say, just off the coast of Chile? Nope. Not even close. Actually, very few Patagonian toothfish actually come from Chile. The name was purely a marketing choice. Lantz actually toyed with several other names (including Pacific seabass and South American seabass) before settling on the exotic-sounding but otherwise irrelevant Chilean moniker.

Turns out, Chilean seabass isn't the only seafood specialty named to please.

I mean, would you eat a slimehead? Neither would I — unless, perhaps, it was introduced to me as orange roughy.

How about goosefish? What if it were the possibly more palatable “monkfish?”

History (and reality television) has shown that we will eat almost anything with a great name IF it has solid marketing behind it — the difference, for instance, between pruuuuunes (I can't even say it unless I scrunch my nose and drag it out) and the significantly more appealing “dried plums.”

Good advertising works like that. It ensures that we relate to the product. It helps us differentiate between A and B when the actual variances are too slight to actually count.

Good advertising is the way buyers and sellers connect — and reconnect. It doesn't just increase market share. It creates entire markets.

Just ask Lee Lantz.

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Don't let Jeffrey M. Peyton's accolades, business accomplishments or cool demeanor fool you. The Sun's newest marketing team member has wing-walked on an airplane at 700 feet, co-piloted the Goodyear Blimp, swam with sharks, and managed to obtain paperwork officially declaring him “legally sane.”