#219 1996 · CPC International (Marmite) · Consumer products

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.

what everyone would do

Try to soften the taste's reputation -- reassure skeptics it's not as strong as they remember, position it as an acquired taste worth acquiring, or reformulate toward broader appeal -- the standard playbook for a product with a known drawback scaring off a chunk of the market.

what they saw

Half the country already hated Marmite loudly enough that everyone knew it, so pretending otherwise would have been an argument nobody believed; the creatives saw that owning the split, rather than denying it, turned a marketing weakness into content people would happily repeat and argue about for free.

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.

why it works

Dramatizing genuine, extreme reactions on both sides gave people already holding a strong opinion a reason to talk about the brand and take a side publicly, generating far more organic conversation than a campaign trying to convince skeptics the taste was fine -- an unbelievable claim would have been ignored or mocked, while an honest depiction of real revulsion and real devotion was something both haters and lovers recognized as true and wanted to share. Because the campaign never asked anyone to change their opinion, it cost nothing in credibility and instead made having any strong opinion about Marmite itself a form of free advertising, since expressing love or hate for the brand became a recognizable cultural reference rather than a private taste preference.

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.

where it breaks

The approach only works when the drawback is genuinely well-known and undeniable -- owning a weakness nobody had actually noticed just introduces the criticism to an audience that wasn't thinking about it, and a drawback that's fixable or genuinely off-putting to nearly everyone (rather than polarizing a real split of the market) gets no benefit from being dramatized rather than addressed. It also depends on having a real base of genuine devotees whose love can be shown convincingly alongside the hate; without both sides being authentic, the format collapses into a one-sided joke at the product's own expense.

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.