Marmite: love the product or hate it (I hate it), you can’t help but be taken in by a brand that’ not only to acknowledges that it can’t please everyone, but turns that fact into a marketing coup. Now, as they unleash their latest gastronomic monstrosity in the form of a cereal bar with a yeasty shock in the middle, Marmite are asking us, the public, if we feel that they have gone “too far”.

I bring up the dreaded but fascinating spread, not to answer their question (the answer is “yes”), nor to analyse the efficacy of suggesting to potential customers that your product may, in fact, be disgusting. I am using Marmite as a rare exemplar of a campaign that actually lends itself to everyone’s favourite bandwagon, social media.

Marmite is the second UK brand to use Facebook’s new sampling ad format. The ads, which pop-up from users’ news-feeds, do not drive potential customers to a website or profile but instead prompt them to accept a free sample, become a fan and declare their undying love or hate. Thus, Marmite informs the potential customer of its new product, acquires their mailing address and the right to use their news-feed as an interactive billboard to advertise to all their friends. All in the guise of a one-question survey with a free cereal bar at the end.

This three-birds-with-one-stone quality is essential to Facebook’s utility. Rather than creating and maintaining a purpose-built website, and worrying about search optimisation and the arduous task of actually updating the site; make a cookie-cutter profile for your product, use one of the many pre-existing applications designed to filter your pen-portrait customer from the 25 million Brits who have volunteered every conceivable detail of themselves, and all you have to do is remember to feed it with fresh content now-and-then.

Now that product fan pages support status updates, videos, a “wall”, games and all the dynamic, interactive features that are de rigueur on people’s personal profiles, keeping the things alive is easier than ever. What’s more, every new development is broadcast via members’ news-feeds, an invaluable viral opportunity if seized upon. “John Hates Marmite: tell him why he’s wrong and while you’re at it give us your mailing address”.

The trouble with attempts by large corporations to get with the cool kids and seek out their custom is that most cool kids don’t want to be sought. They resent patronising advertisers ‘tricking’ them into participating in their campaigns, and everyone hates spam. The trick, as I see it, is making your move so quick and unobtrusive and so natural in the context of Facebook, that it seems more like an off-hand remark than an all-day seminar.

The idea is to move on-line marketing away from driving customers to a static website, which is really just an electronic brochure, towards a one-on-one, back-and-forth “conversation” between a brand and its customers. Ideally, all we’ll have to do is log into Facebook and every brand that thinks it stands a chance will come looking for us to ask a question, offer advice or draw our attention to something cool.

That’s the strength of Marmite’s campaign; it has a pre-established “in”, a controversy. Its incursion doesn’t feel forced. Browsing the news you notice a friend has said the wrong thing about what to have on your toast, you correct him and sign-up for a free cereal bar, and the good news spreads to all you other friends. No nonsense, no fuss. So while other brands are regarded as nuisances, we will all be friends (or enemies) of Marmite.

John McIntosh

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