A fine example of location-based marketing: the sardines of Comptoir de Belle-Ile-en-Mer

One of the good surprises of the SIAL was the Comptoir de Belle-Ile-en-Mer, a small producer of canned sea-food products. Rather than the products themselves, what attracted us was actually the marketing around the young brand. We noticed two interesting features.

First, the packaging is very homogeneous in terms of design and follows the current trend that we could call “funny labels”. Monoprix kind of launched that trend on a large scale when they revamped the design of the products sold under their own brand (see our post earlier this year).

The same trigger is used here where products have been given funny names, slogans, and even a funny barcode (very well done and very similar to the barcode we mentioned on the Amazon Kindle packaging).

Second, sardine in oil being the flagship product they have launched a “collection” of different recipes.

Although the two concepts are not revolutionary it’s well executed and deserves a note. The company was launched 18 months ago by Philippe Hamache, a former head of marketing at Europe 2 (a French radio station that was born in 1986 and replaced in 2008 by Virgin radio).