The principle that "honesty is the best policy" has not always come first in the advertising rulebook, especially if a product summons the level of revulsion that Marmite can. But the brand’s decision to acknowledge its haters became one of the UK’s biggest marketing success stories.
In 1996, Richard Flintham and Andy McLeod, then a creative team at BMP DDB, discovered that one of them loved Marmite and the other hated it. Their polarising opinions became the basis of the "Love it or hate it" campaign, an idea that lives on in the brand’s advertising to this day.
And it has also become part of British pop culture. "Marmite" is a term synonymous with a divisive issue or person, and has been applied to the likes of Victoria Beckham, Russell Brand, panto and Brexit.
