Marmite “Love It or Hate It”: thirty years of advertising to people who will never buy it

Two junior creatives at BMP DDB were put on Marmite in 1996. One of them loved it. The other could not stand it. Rather than resolve the argument, Richard Flintham and Andy McLeod wrote it down, and thirty years later “like Marmite” is how the English language describes anything that divides a room.

Our take: “Love it or hate it” is the best example in British advertising of a brand refusing to fix its biggest problem. It is also, on the published evidence, one of the most profitable decisions any food marketer has ever taken.

Credits

• Client: Marmite, Unilever
• Agency: BMP DDB, later DDB London, now adam&eveDDB
• Line written by: Richard Flintham and Andy McLeod, 1996
• Launched: October 1996

Credits for the 2013 film “Neglect”, reviewed below:

• Agency: adam&eveDDB
• Creative directors: Rob Messeter and Mike Crowe
• Creative team: Nick Sheppard and Tom Webber
• Director: James Rouse
• Production company: Outsider
• Voiceover: Michael Buerk
• Launched: 5 August 2013

The brief: a product a quarter of the country actively dislikes

Marmite has a structural problem no amount of media weight can solve. A large minority of the population finds it genuinely unpleasant, and no advertising has ever converted them. Conventional food marketing would soften the taste, widen the appeal and lose the brand in the process. The 1996 brief was the standard one: give the brand a new lease of life.

Flintham and McLeod did not go looking for a strapline. McLeod has described the line as a statement of fact rather than a slogan, which is exactly why it works. The phrase itself was not invented in the agency either: British newspapers were using “love it or hate it” about Marmite from 1973. What BMP DDB did was notice that the public had already written the strategy and stop arguing with it.

The idea: advertise the hate as well

The campaign launched in October 1996 with two films, and the pairing is the whole thought. One showed devotees polishing a jar. The other showed a Marmite-shaped voodoo doll being stuck with pins. Half the advertising budget went on people who will never buy the product.

That is a harder sell to a client than it sounds. Depicting revulsion at your own product breaks the first rule of packaged goods advertising, and it only works because the revulsion is specific, funny and shared. The hate is not a criticism of Marmite. It is proof that Marmite is strong enough to provoke one.

The structure has proved almost infinitely refillable. In 2003 BMP DDB ran “Lifeguard”, in which a rescuer gives mouth to mouth and the revived man, tasting Marmite on his lips, pulls him back for a second kiss. It was written by Adam Tucker and art directed by Justin Tindall, directed by Dominic Murphy through Partisan, and drew an ITC investigation over the same-sex kiss. In 2010 the brand recruited thirty superfans into a mock Victorian secret society, the Marmarati, and launched Marmite XO on 8 March with no paid media at all.

The craft: the year Marmite hired Michael Buerk

The standout execution arrived on 5 August 2013, Marmite’s first television advertising in two years. “Neglect” is shot as a fly-on-the-wall rescue documentary. A team in white coats raids British kitchens, recovers jars abandoned at the back of cupboards, treats them at a rehoming centre and matches them with loving families. Faces are pixellated. Michael Buerk narrates.

The casting of Buerk is the decision that makes it. He read the news at the BBC for decades and reported the 1984 Ethiopian famine, so his voice carries the exact register the film is parodying. James Rouse directs it absolutely straight, with no wink and no comedy lighting, which is what turns a one-line gag into ninety seconds. Rob Messeter and Mike Crowe were the creative directors, with Nick Sheppard and Tom Webber writing and art directing.

The restraint is the craft. Every element that could have signalled “this is a joke” was withheld, which is precisely why some of the audience did not take it as one.

The complaints, and what the ASA actually did

Around 250 complaints reached the Advertising Standards Authority in the first twenty four hours. The figure stood at 504 by the time the ASA reached its decision, and 738 across the full year, making “Neglect” the second most complained about advertisement of 2013 in the ASA’s annual round-up. Complainants argued that the film trivialised the work of animal welfare and child protection services.

It is worth being precise about the outcome, because it is routinely reported wrongly. The ASA did not investigate and then clear the ad. The ASA Council decided there were no grounds for further action and never opened a formal investigation at all.

While some viewers might find the theme and style of the ads distasteful most would recognise the ads were a spoof. They were unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence or to be irresponsible and were unlikely to cause undue fear or distress to young viewers.

ASA Council, reported by The Grocer

Unilever said the commercial had “ranked highly throughout our rigorous testing process”, and donated £18,000 to the RSPCA. That donation is the smartest twenty minutes of work in the whole campaign. It removed the only line of attack that could have stuck, which was that the brand was laughing at animal welfare rather than at itself.

The results: three IPA papers and a very good eight weeks

The effectiveness record here is unusually deep for a food brand. The 2002 IPA Effectiveness Awards Silver, “Please don’t spread it thinly”, reported average sales growth of five per cent a year from 1995 to 2001 in a declining category. Against £12.4m of advertising spend it attributed £53.5m of sales to the advertising. Without advertising and PR, the paper calculated, sales would have fallen 26 per cent.

A second paper followed in 2008, a Bronze for the launch of Marmite Squeezy, showing short-term payback of £1.30 for every pound spent and a projected long-term return of £2.30. A third, in 2011, covered the Marmarati and the launch of Marmite XO on earned media alone. Three IPA papers across three decades, on the same line, is a rare thing.

“Neglect” delivered too. Value sales rose 14.1 per cent and volume 15.2 per cent during the eight weeks the television campaign ran, measured against the preceding eight weeks, on Nielsen data reported by Marketing Week. Marmite took £37m in sales across 2013. The campaign was named Brand of the Year at the Marketing Week Engage Awards in 2014.

The legacy: the line outlived three agency names

BMP DDB became DDB London, which became adam&eveDDB after the 2012 merger, and the account has never left the building. The work has kept finding new mechanics rather than new positionings. In 2017 the agency partnered with DNAFit on the Marmite Gene Project, offering a genetic test for love or hate, which reported a 14 per cent sales lift and took three Graphite and four Wood Pencils at D&AD in 2018, plus a Gold Lion in Creative Data and two Film Craft Silvers at Cannes.

Cannes gave the campaign a Gold in Print and Publishing in 2019 for “Lovers, Don’t Spread the Hate”, the posters showing butter, honey and marmalade contaminated by a dirty Marmite knife. In 2023 came “Baby Scan”, a 4D ultrasound experiment on whether unborn children are lovers or haters, and “First Timers”, a puppet film aimed at eighteen to twenty four year olds. The mechanics change every time. The proposition has not changed since 1996.

That consistency is the actual asset, and it is why the campaign sits so high in our ranking of the best advertising campaigns. Very few British brands can point to a single sentence that has survived three agency names, four decades of media change and a category that has moved on entirely.

What to steal

• Find the thing consumers already say about you and print it, rather than arguing with it.
• Give the objection equal airtime. A brand confident enough to show the hate looks stronger, not weaker.
• Play a parody dead straight. The moment you signal the joke, the joke stops working.
• Cast for register, not fame. Michael Buerk is doing strategy, not celebrity.
• When the offence is aimed at a cause, support the cause. The RSPCA donation closed the story down.
• Change the mechanic every time and never touch the proposition.

The verdict

A line written by two juniors in 1996 has produced three IPA effectiveness papers, Cannes Golds in two separate crafts, £53.5m of advertising-attributed sales in its first six years and a 14.1 per cent sales jump from its most complained about film, all without once changing what it says. It loses nothing for the 738 complaints, because deliberately provoking half your audience is the strategy working rather than failing. On our scoring method this is close to the ceiling: the rare campaign where the idea, the evidence and the longevity all point the same way.