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After experiencing rapid growth in the 1980s as a new industry, the farm raised catfish industry faced a downturn due to concerns about health because of water pollution and similar issues that affected the seafood industry in the late 1980s. While the catfish industry’s growth continued in the early 90s, it was at a slower pace than during the 70s and earlier 80s. In 1994, there was an actual decrease in total production and a significant downturn in per capita consumption (Kinnucan).

Kinnucan believes that, unlike most agricultural commodities, catfish had a new story to tell to people who were unfamiliar with it. Their promotion program created an awareness of “farm-raised catfish” as a new product and provided information which replaced a lot of misinformation regarding catfish. This convinced people to try the product which had nutritional advantages over some meat products. This contrasts with the persuasive messages used for many generic agricultural commodity promotion programs.

Kinnucan and Miao (p. 97) found that for catfish “.. producer returns from the total advertising program were positive, but that a different media mix would have resulted in larger profits.” This was because “…media-specific effects differed significantly, with magazine and radio expenditures showing a positive response, newspaper no response, and television a negative (but unreliable) response.”

More generally, Keithly and Roberts (p. 12) noted that “when analyzed at the commodity level, seafood seems to be a successful candidate for generic promotion efforts,” given the large number of seafood items and types, and the relative homogeneous nature to seafood. The product maintains its identity in the marketing channel and the industry generally has clear standards that make it possible for the consumer to identify it at the time of purchase. Further, the seafood industry has well-established marketing channels, and, per capita consumption in seafood is relatively small. However, they go on to note that there are certain industry and market characteristics of the seafood industry that make long-term effectiveness of generic promotion efforts problematic. For example, domestic producers and the marketing sector may have competing objectives involving imports of products. Geographic dispersal of producers would likely hamper promotional efforts on a national scale; and lack of barriers to entry would likely somewhat mitigate long-term effectiveness of promotion efforts.