Turning Marmageddon into flawsome
Some Marmite, today
In this guest post, Clemenger BBDO’s Al Crawford argues that Marmite offers a lesson to all marketers in how to make the most of a setback.
Over the last few days, some of our friends across the ditch have had to contend with a looming famine. The threat of ‘Marmageddon’ has bounced around national and international press and has even got the PM advising people to spread it thinly so they can eke out supplies as long as possible.
Whilst my heart goes out to the army of Marmite lovers at this difficult time, I want to focus on something else: namely, that this is yet another great example of brands turning disadvantage into fantastic opportunity.
The Christchurch tragedy disrupted the production of Marmite and, rather than simply curse their ill-fortune, they’ve turned it into a brand and PR opportunity with Sanitarium’s general manager, Pierre Van Heerden, kicking things off by urging people not to panic buy the stuff.
We’ve seen this kind of thing before, with the likes of FedEx responding to one of its employees bunging a customer’s package over a fence with the ‘Absolutely, Positively Unacceptable’ campaign…
…or Domino’s launching the Pizza Turnaround campaign featuring an appropriately cheesy CEO, after some of their employees highlighted the product was more than a little bit shite.
These are campaigns that have gone beyond merely putting out the fire, they’ve become a beacon for how the companies operate and evolve.
You don’t even need a good crisis to make something out of your dirty laundry.
I worked on the original ‘Love it or Hate it’ Marmite campaign in the UK, where we embraced our focus groups turning into physical brawls by celebrating the fact that, for many people, Marmite has been scooped out of Beelzebub’s wazoo.
In my wildest dreams, I like to think this paved the way for Pot Noodle’s ‘Slag of All Slacks’ campaign, ‘It’s a Skoda, honest’ (which aired at a time when Skoda had just been transformed from Commie shitbox to VW’s younger brother) and even Moro’s ‘4th best chocolate bar in New Zealand’ campaign.
So we should applaud Marmite’s latest cheeky reversal. It’s another reminder that in the modern age, where we’re scared shitless of failure and surrounded by images of perfection, you can embrace potential negatives and make something awesome out of them. It takes courage and agility to do it, especially when our natural reaction is to try and hide our brand’s saggy bits. One of the many sadnesses of the Kony 2012 campaign is that rather than harnessing the negative criticism and evolving the organisation, they’ve simply tried to put out the fire.
Trendwatching.com has dubbed brands who celebrate their deficiencies as ‘Flawsome’. The term, as they acknowledge, is likely to be both memorable and have you reaching for the both the bullshit bingo card and the sick bag. The Chinese, as usual, cottoned on to this fact ages ago: their word for crisis is made up of two characters, one that means danger, the other, opportunity.
- Al Crawford is executive planning director at Clemenger BBDO Sydney
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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Wrong Marmite jar in this article. Shouldn’t you use the NZ one?
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Wrong, wrong, wrong Marmite.
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Completely wrong Marmite.
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Apparently that’s the wrong marmite.
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Yeah, they do sell that brand in NZ, but it’s re-labelled as My Mate – Sanitarium jealously guard their local trade make ownership.
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Don’t the Kiwis spell it “Marmuuute”?
Correction, the British version is cockneyfied to “Me Mate”
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Don’t waste the Marmite people!
Love the 4th Best ad. It’s a perfect example of our love of imperfections. I’m not perfect and I just love brands that recognise their limitations and own up to them.
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“Scraped out of Beelzebub’s wazoo” – love it
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Avis try harder?
Lemon?
Not everyone’s perfect?
Come on Al, you weren’t the first – and you worked at DDB as well.
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Embrace the imperfections. Story of my life.
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Stop this Marmite Blasphemy!
The english version of Marmite is imported under the brand Our Mate.
The term My Mate comes from the ads of the 90’s. Not really sure why they changed the brand name to Our Mate though, seems to me it would of made more sense as My Mate, but who am I to question the Marmite gods.
Sanitarium make an AU/NZ Marmite, but it’s not a patch on Our Mate, Marmite.
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Absolutely right, it’s Our Mate, not My Mate, my bad. Should have looked in the cupboard rather than the memory. Anyway, the real hard stuff is now sold in the UK as Marmite X.O. (Extra Old) – 250g of serious flavour!
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