The Toothfish Problem

IN 1977, AN AMERICAN FISH WHOLESALER named Lee Lantz was wandering around a Chilean port when he encountered something that would transform fine dining: the Patagonian toothfish. Ugly, deep-dwelling, and saddled with perhaps the least appetising name in commercial fishing, it was dismissed by local fishermen as worthless bycatch.

Lantz tried it anyway. The flesh was buttery, white, and impossible to overcook. He saw potential provided  he could solve one problem: nobody was going to order toothfish.

So he invented a name. He called it “Chilean sea bass.”

It was geographic enough to sound exotic, familiar enough to be unthreatening, and completely, technically, wrong. The fish isn’t a bass and most aren’t even caught near Chile. But it worked. Within two decades, Chilean sea bass was gracing the menus of upscale restaurants worldwide. Landings multiplied by more than thirty times (to the point of being overfished). The fishing industry started calling it white gold. In 1994, the FDA accepted the invented label as an “alternative market name”. By 2001, Bon Appétit named it dish of the year.

The lesson is simple: nomenclature matters. What you call something shapes how people perceive it, whether they’ll adopt it, and ultimately whether it ever makes the jump into the mainstream.

The Chinese gooseberry, for example, became the kiwifruit in 1959. It wasn’t reinvention; it was a necessary translation for a Cold War export market, while also sidestepping US customs confusion over “gooseberries”

Which brings us – slightly uncomfortably -to industrialised construction.

The naming challenge

The construction sector has spent years trying to name its own transformation. “Modern Methods of Construction” had a reasonable run. It was deliberately broad and the “modern” label signalled progress without demanding specificity. But MMC has accumulated baggage. It has become conflated with supplier failures and often synonymous with volumetric construction.

The pivot to “industrialised construction” is understandable. It emphasises process over product, systems over components. It borrows the logic of manufacturing: repeatability, reduced variability, integrated design-to-delivery, and continuous improvement. It signals an evolution, from describing what we build differently to describing how we organise end-to-end process of our capital delivery.

And yet. The term carries problems.

The Victorian Echo

For most people, the word “industrialised” evokes smokestacks, not precision manufacturing. It summons visions of Brunel (and possibly even Stalin for some), not advanced production systems. It sounds like something from the past we escaped, not a future we should embrace.

This isn’t merely aesthetic. The associations matter because they shape the instinctive reactions of the stakeholders whose buy-in we need.

Glasgow faced a version of this in 1983. With 21% male unemployment, entrenched “No Mean City” stereotypes of violence, and deep post-industrial decline, the city didn’t try to rehabilitate its industrial identity: it sidestepped it entirely. Glasgow’s Miles Better used Mr Happy and an aspirational slogan that made the Victorian legacy irrelevant to the conversation. It worked: European City of Culture followed in 1990.

Industrialised construction does the opposite. It centres the very associations it needs to escape.

The nebulousness trap

There’s a second problem.

In trying to be conceptually precise, the term has become practically vague. Industrialised construction is defined as the application of standard, repeatable manufacturing and assembly processes to the delivery of building and infrastructure projects. As a philosophy, that breadth is a strength. As a market term, it’s a weakness.

MMC, for all its faults, had the MHCLG’s seven-category framework. It was imperfect, but it gave people something to point at. “Industrialised construction” gestures at a direction of travel without specifying what qualifies as arrival. It risks becoming one of those terms that sounds important, means different things to different people, and therefore changes nothing.

That said, vagueness doesn’t always prevent traction. A parliamentary inquiry concluded the Northern Powerhouse was “a vague concept” and yet it achieved striking recognition among northern residents within eighteen months, unusually high for regional policy. A term can gain currency without achieving clarity.

But it’s a risky bet.

 The Enquirer test

The blunt test, is whether a term can be used by Construction Enquirer, without a paragraph of explanation. If it can’t, it unlikely to become part of the lexicon. Right now, “Industrialised construction” fails the Enquirer test. It needs some help.

The Lantz principle

The genius of “Chilean sea bass” wasn’t just euphemism. It was strategic positioning. The name did several things at once: it sounded premium (supporting high prices), it implied provenance  (even if misleading), and it slotted neatly into an existing category that consumers already valued.

Industrialised construction’s rebrand needs to achieve something similarly multi-dimensional. It needs to:

• Signal progress without triggering risk aversion
• Be specific enough for clients, procurers and investors
• Be accessible enough for policymakers and the press
• Sound like an evolution, not a revolution
• Avoid both the staleness of “modern” and the archaism of “industrial”

That’s a tall order.

Perhaps the answer isn’t a single term at all, but different language for different audiences, precision for practitioners, clarity for clients, and something less soot-stained for everyone else. Or perhaps the sector leans into the Brunel echo and turns the perceived weakness into a strength (Boring, Oregon did, after all, partner with Dull, Scotland and Bland Shire, Australia to form the “League of Extraordinary Communities”.)

Construction’s transformation won’t succeed or fail based on what we call it. But the  name might make an already difficult task harder. It creates friction where we need flow. It invites scepticism where we need curiosity.

If industrialised construction is to be the sector’s chosen banner, it needs two things: PR support to ensure the messages land, and an industry willing to find the future attractive… even when it sounds Victorian.