MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS: "LOVE IT OR HATE IT"

Marmite enlisted advertising agency DDB to launch an integrated marketing campaign. They faced many brand challenges and their objectives were to overcome these. Consumption of Marmite was in decline due to consumer distaste and decline in toast consumption. Along with criticism due to lack of innovation they also faced competition from own brand equivalents.

They decided to use digital media to launch an all new campaign. They held a ‘love it or hate it’ online campaign simultaneous to the actual governmental elections. They encouraged their publics to vote ‘love it’ or ‘hate it’, polarizing their publics and engaging their passions. The ‘love it or hate it’ slogan has become so well known that it has spread to other media and become a familiar phrase- “it’s like marmite- love it or hate it”.

They also launched an online virtual Paddington’s kitchen created by AKOA. The virtual kitchen encouraged visitors to share marmite sandwich ideas and general marmite recipes. Along with this they launched a Facebook page (250,000 fans) and a viral advert of a baby being sick over a mother who is eating marmite. This formed part of a wider media strategy, including a launch of a TV advert and 6 press advertisements.

This innovative campaign targeted not only marmite lovers but also the ‘waverers’. The main target audience is mothers and families. This is indicated by the use of Paddington bear- swaps his famous marmalade sandwiches for marmite ones in one of their TV adverts and his virtual kitchen. Paddington is familiar to children and nostalgic to many adults. They also launched a helpline which was aimed at mothers making packed lunches offering sandwich suggestions- similar to the virtual Paddington kitchen.

I feel this campaign was very successful and interesting to study as they used the fact that people either love marmite or hate it to their advantage- they polarized their publics to develop competition between the ‘lovers’ and ‘haters’. The use of anti-advertising developed brand loyalty. They also successfully involved all of their publics and even attracted the ‘waverers’ by making them feel the need to decide if they ‘love it’ or ‘hate it’. Finally, the creativity of the campaign created hype and ‘talkability’ therefore it almost created its own PR. The campaign was so successful that it allowed marmite to increase their price premium by 30%.