Norway, the world’s largest producer of Atlantic Salmon, played a crucial role in introducing farmed salmon that is safe to eat raw to Japan in the 1980s under a national initiative called “Project Japan.” While the resulting culinary collaboration ‘Salmon Sushi’ became successful in diversifying sushi offerings in Japan and around the world, its strong association ironically created a huge limitation for Norwegian Salmon consumption in Japan outside of raw usage like sushi and sashimi.

To increase its consumption volume and frequency, our challenge was to promote a wider variety of usages including heated preparation and increase its presence as a choice for daily home cooking. Our biggest challenge was that consumers did not know how, nor think of using the Norwegian Salmon outside of what they already knew. We needed an intriguing concept, inspirational yet relatable usage ideas, and creative delivery to capture the attention of consumers to educate and create demand, and furthermore, the value chain to secure supply of Norwegian Salmon in larger portions and suitable for heat preparation.

We approached this challenge with a simple yet bold concept to position the Norwegian Salmon, which can be characterized by its juicy and tender quality, as everyone’s favorite “meat.” Meat in Japanese is “niku” and beef, pork, chicken are called gyu-niku (cow-meat), buta-niku (pig-meat), tori-niku (bird-meat), respectively. We created a play-on-words concept to propose the “samo-niku (samo-meat)” and suggest that Norwegian Salmon is the fourth option following the main three meats that play the main role in Japanese cuisine today. By inspiring consumers to simply switch the meat in their familiar recipes to “samo-meat,” they could easily incorporate Norwegian Salmon in their daily cooking practices, and effortlessly double their recurring meat repertoire with the addition of healthful, delicious, and sustainable seafood.

We launched the “Samo-Meat” Project with a series of inspirational ‘switch’ recipes through a holistic mix of earned media, paid and social media, influencers, digital, retail, and offline activation. Additionally, to strengthen its positioning as the “fourth meat,” we aimed to maximize exposure around “Good Meat Day” on November 29th, an unofficial pun holiday in Japan to treat yourself with “good meat.” To capture the attention of meat lovers with a new type of savory “meat,” we opened a limited time offer “Samo-Meat Shop” to give out 1,129 pieces of free “Samo-Meat” sticks to visitors who declared which favorite meat out of beef, pork, or chicken they wanted to switch to “samo-meat.” The sudden appearance of the abstract bright salmon orange “meat shop” at the heart of Tokyo drew salmon aficionados to jump at the unique opportunity to savor the tender and juicy Norwegian Salmon in ways they had never tasted before, which moreover attracted the attention of mass media.