View of our award entry http://awards.agency/marmitetasteface/.

Background to project/campaign

In 2017, the brand set out to discover the real reason why the sticky stuff has long divided the nation, and attract a younger generation of lovers.

The answer was, surprisingly, science. In partnership with leading boffins, they discovered ‘The Marmite Gene’. It turns out your genetics determine whether you’re born a lover, or a hater. This ground-breaking news got lots of people talking about Marmite again, but our challenge was to get families up and down the country actually tasting it.

Budget

*£100K *Confidential

Objectives

For years Marmite’s viewpoint on its product has been that you either love it or hate it. This was creating a problem of perception as potential customers were scared at the risk that they may hate the product, making their experimental purchase a waste.

Marmite wanted to reach out to those people who haven’t yet made up their minds and to get existing haters to reconsider. To do this they needed a way to reignite the conversation about loving and hating Marmite and what causes this division. Thus, the Marmite Gene was born.

Specifically, within Marmite’s digital channels, our mission was to translate the brand awareness generated by the TV and PR elements of the campaign into something that tangibly enabled people to ‘test it for themselves’, ideally with the product in hand.

Our challenge was to get families actually tasting it in a fun way.

Strategy

The ‘Marmite Gene’ was the overarching idea that tied together a variety of different channels and activations. Digital in particular had a significant role to play in terms of translating the brand awareness generated by the TV and PR elements of the campaign into something that tangibly enabled people to ‘test if for themselves’.

But how do you bring the Marmite Gene idea to life, in a way that inspired trial and got the whole family involved?

Asking our target audience of on-the-fencers to complete a genetic test wasn’t really an option, so we did the next best thing. We let their reaction do the talking, gauging whether they were a lover or a hater based on their facial expression as they tried the product.

Innovation

This campaign pushed Marmite to take a number of risks and disrupted their traditional practices in a number of areas.

Firstly, it gave us a clear role for the brand’s mobile site beyond just product and brand news. As the existing template couldn’t handle the intended experience, we convinced the client to host it on a separate microsite that was then reskinned to feel as though it was part of the main site.

This site gave us a central hub to which we could drive traffic from all touchpoints, including samples, jars, social posts and even the end-frame of the television commercial (the first time Unilever had done so).

The digital experience allowed us to make our sampling activity intrinsic to the broader campaign, rather than a tactical add-on to support it - this made sure the product was front and centre of the consumer’s experience.

The outputs of the experience also allowed us to evolve the way in which Marmite speaks to its audience. By giving test-takers their results on a percentage scale demonstrated that Marmite’s flavour isn’t as binary as love or hate, and acknowledges the ‘inbetweeners’ for the first time.

Allowing our audience to customise the result Gif motivated them to share with others and generate some amazing UGC. This also gave Marmite to hero their community in a way that the brand hadn’t done previously.

TasteFace has allowed us to generate PR coverage over and above a traditional ATL campaign, receiving coverage from tech-focused blogs and drawing the attention of Microsoft’s AI Division, who expressed an interest in working with AnalogFolk as creative partners as a result of this activity.

Last but certainly not least, was the fact that the digital experience had data capture and optimisation as a key consideration. Capturing customer information about taste preferences and contact details during the campaign means that, for the first time, Marmite can start to build a clearer picture of its key segments and target them in a tailored way going forwards.

Execution

We wanted our audience to try Marmite. After requesting a free sample from the site, they could then take the TasteFace test which analysed their reaction and gave them a score on a scale of 100% Lover to 100% Hater as well as a bespoke reaction Gif.

The API’s output of eight separate love/hate emotions wasn’t useful in its raw form due to the fact that we were looking for a binary result. This meant that we would also have to build a bespoke algorithm to process the results and map them onto our Love/Hate scale.

There were also problems to solve with regard to where to host the experience, how to process and store video inputs, ensuring accurate results, and getting the experience to work across multiple operating systems.

In addition to the tech considerations, we also need to package the experience up in an engaging and intuitive way.

Results

The TasteFace experience did two key jobs: it prompted our existing audience to dig out their Marmite from the back of the cupboard and reconsider it as an everyday spread and, more importantly, it provided a fresh, engaging way of distributing free samples and encouraging their consumption.

It also allowed us to generate PR coverage over and above the ATL campaign in tech-focused blogs.

TasteFace has achieved the following results:

●   Over 550k visitors to the TasteFace microsite

●   Within the first 6 weeks over 50k samples were distributed – currently 152K

●   Sales of Marmite increased 60% in Tesco over the campaign period

An additional benefit of these objectives is that both elements also allow us to capture a little more information about our customers - their contact details, whether they’re a lover or a hater and, if they chose to use the multi-user functionality, an estimate of their household make-up. For instance, did you know that 73% of Nottingham are born lovers vs Chelmsford’s 45% haters.

Testimonials

“The experience was a great use of innovative technology, with driving trial of Marmite at its heart. This was key to driving brand growth. Hosting it on the Marmite site provided a central point through which we could create a streamlined consumer journey. AnalogFolk were a great partner in realising our ambitions for this project.”

Philippa Atkinson  – Unilever, Marmite