Leading the Way to a Sustainable Future: The Positive Impact of a Generation Marketing Campaign

Introduction

One of the greatest challenges humanity faces today is to balance the forces of globalization with national identities (Beriss, 2019). This chapter highlights the growing importance of the testimony that passes to the new generations of consumers and that preserves a country’s uniqueness. It presents the results of a very recent campaign that was created to increase consumers’ awareness regarding sustainability; the campaign was implemented by Docapesca Portos e Lotas, SA Portugal (a state-owned company, under the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Sea).

In the last few years a lot has been said – and published – regarding the possibility and the advantages of making campaigns to increase the awareness of consumers to various prominent and urgent issues. Food sustainability, namely fish sustainability, has been one of the most crucial of those issues. Marketing communications are one of the most difficult but crucially important components of modern marketing (Reynolds & Phillips, 2019). One of the most challenging and critical aspects when implementing marketing campaigns is the ability to better understand consumers’ sensibility to extremely important issues and to inform consumers of some aspects of the product or service. Every year thousands of campaigns are planned and implemented all over the world, trying to reach consumers so to make them buy a specific product, service or solution (Ettenson et al., 2013) or change their attitude towards something. But somehow the analyses and the discussion of a campaign’s results is a quite rare topic in the scientific literature. When national campaigns are over - after all the initiatives and communication approaches have been used and after all the money has been spent - who shows the results and where are they published? Was it worth it? It is this missing type of analyses that this chapter brings. Plus, it gives special attention to the importance of educating consumers towards a more sustainable consumption.

In 2019, consumption of fish in EU increased for nearly all of the main commercial species. Portugal is the absolute champion, with an average consumption of 57 kg of fish and seafood per person, per year. This is more than double the EU’s average per capita (European Commission, 2020). The Portuguese follow the Mediterranean diet which actively encourages the consumption of fish and represents the crystallization of the centuries-old cooking legacies of different civilizations (Hidalgo-Mora et al., 2020). Culture theorists like Claude Fischler, Leon Rappoport, Mary Douglas, Poul Rozin, Massimo Montanari, Pierre Bourdieu and Cornelius Castoriadis agree that the basic determinant of population’s diet is its culture, and food has always been much more than a source of physical nourishment (Madsen & Chkoniya, 2019b). In Portugal fish is such an important dietary element of the countries cuisine that it is difficult to imagine how people could survive without it (Simoons, 1994). Consumers target their food orientations towards fish because they have symbolic and emotional weight attached. Of course consumers also eat fish because of the rational side of it: consumers perceive fish as being particularly healthy, valuable for children because it has valuable supplements of protein, calcium, and vitamin B12, and higher fish consumption in pregnancy may confer protection against the harmful effect of prenatal exposure to toxins (Jedrychowski et al., 2010). However, in Portugal fish is much more than just that: in Portugal fish is impregnated with identity. But in a world where globalization tends to standardize everything and digital technology tends to accelerate the globalization process, some could predict that this heavy presence of fish in the construct of Portuguese identity is going to dissolve quickly in a near future. There is an eternal love story between Portugal and fish (Madsen, 2014), that is transmitted through out generations and so this heavy testimony is inherited.

This chapter uses the example of Docapesca’s pioneer initiative to prove that it is worth it to invest in consumer’s education, it is possible to maintain the testimony updated when we adopt a generation focused approach to implement a national marketing campaign, and it is possible to obtain valuable advances in consumption for a sustainable future.