#198 1996 · CPC International (Marmite) · Consumer productsown-the-weakness
CPC International, sitting on a spread half of Britain already refused to eat, let its ad agency turn that exact revulsion into the entire campaign instead of trying to make more people like the taste
the problem
A polarizing taste was scaring off half of potential buyers
background
Marmite, the yeast-extract spread first sold in Britain in 1902, had a taste so strong that a large share of the population would not touch it. By the mid-1990s it was owned by CPC International Inc. (which had bought Marmite and Bovril in 1990 and would rename itself Best Foods in 1998, before Unilever acquired it in 2000). The brand's ad agency, BMP DDB, was briefed to grow a product that a chunk of the country actively hated.
Creatives Andy McLeod and Richard Flintham realized their own split opinion — one hated Marmite, one loved it — was the campaign. Rather than reassure skeptics the taste wasn't so bad, the October 1996 'Love it or Hate it' launch ran two 30-second films back to back: one showing people relishing the spread, the other showing people spitting it out and hurling jars into the sea.
the move
BMP DDB's 1996 'Love it or Hate it' campaign for Marmite made the product's own divisiveness the entire message, running paired ads that dramatized both extreme love and extreme disgust for the same spread rather than arguing the taste was likeable.
the payoff
The line became one of British advertising's longest-running slogans, still in active use three decades later; Marmite continued the platform into later campaigns like the 2020 'Mind Control' film, which drove a reported 400% jump in brand awareness and roughly 100,000 new household purchases per D&AD's award record, and a separate 'Gene Project' activation credited with a 33% sales increase per WARC. Those later figures belong to follow-on executions of the platform, not the original 1996 launch, for which granular sales data from the period is not independently available in current sourcing.
what came after
'Marmite' entered British English as a standalone adjective for anything fiercely polarizing, and the love-it-or-hate-it structure became a template other brands have since copied for products with a real, known drawback.
filed under
references
- [1]How Marmite increased sales by 33% with the Gene ProjectWARC, 2020warc.com
- [2]Mind ControlD&AD, 2020dandad.org