Our long-standing and iconic brand positioning has been about bravely surfacing a product truth: that people either love it, or hate it. There’s never any wavering in the middle ground. And over many years this marketing has led to Marmite entering the cultural lexicon in Britain as its own adjective. If something is a bit “Marmite” – this is shorthand for something that polarises opinion.

Our brief was to amplify this positioning and create PR buzz by capitalising on divisive cultural moments throughout the year.

We knew that Brexit was the biggest driver of public conversation that year and would dominate newsrooms and public opinion. But no other brands would dare go near a topic so politically contentious and emotionally charged.

Our challenge was how to use divisive moments like Brexit to make some noise for Marmite, without creating a PR disaster.

As a brand, we have been dividing public opinion for over 100 years. So, it was only fitting for Marmite to be the one brand that would boldly take a stand on Brexit – albeit with tongue firmly in cheek. The creative idea was for Marmite to playfully step into the firing line around Brexit, and unite both sides of the Brexit conversation through our expected humour.

Similarly, to underscore our love it or hate it swagger, we would step into a conversation with the very divisive public personality – Piers Morgan. With some calculated self-deprecation we’d seek his likely disapproval of our new Peanut Butter & Marmite product, and further unite people to our brand (whether or not they liked Brexit, Piers Morgan – or indeed Marmite).

Marmite is a national icon in the UK, but in 2019, as the UK approached Brexit, we were a nation divided. Through social listening we saw that people were already describing contentious things like Brexit as ‘Marmite’. Our strategy was to use social listening to identify divisive topics and find topical opportunities to drive Brand Love. We could plan ahead for a series of milestone Brexit dates coming up, but the situation was constantly changing. That meant we had to be reactive to events and the conversation as it unfolded. We took a newsroom approach and monitored Twitter so that when influential people like Piers Morgan were talking about ‘Marmite’ we could be quick off the mark with an organic response and drive earned media. We also decided to put timely paid media placements in national newspapers to react to news events and further amplify PR.

Focus on 5 moments:

March 2019: As the 1st Brexit ‘cliff edge’ deadline approached, we would launch ourselves into the public conversation via precision timed reactive national press and social advertising.

May 2019: The European elections were seen as a proxy for a ‘re-vote on Brexit’. We knew this would be a chance to provide some much-needed light relief on social media with both sides of the conversation.

For our most important new product launch of the year – and one that would predictably polarise public opinion – we would engage with the most divisive public figure: Piers Morgan.

Valentine’s Day: For a brand that was firmly half about Love – we stepped into the conversation with a product that we knew people would probably hate.

To provide fitting closure to our campaign, we declared the final Brexit date (31 January 2020) as National Love it or Hate it Day.

Uncharacteristically for Marmite, the PR and advertising activity didn’t divide. It united. Our plucky condiment earned 6M+ impressions, 130K engagements, and 2min airtime on GMB TV worth £650,000.

The campaigns collectively achieved 250M impressions overall. The distribution for Marmite Peanut Butter increased from 200 shops to over 2000 due to popular demand generated. Engagement rates spiked at around 8% on average across all platforms well above benchmarks. And, gratifyingly, an overwhelming majority were very glad we spoke up with some much-needed light relief on such a contentious subject: Over 500K engagements in terms of loves, hates and shares.