Case study: Marmite

Case study: Marmite

Marmite has a long history of unusual advertising based around the idea ‘You either love it or you hate it’. How many of the persuasive techniques can you spot in these adverts?

Advertising: Persuasive techniques blog task

Create a new blog post called 'Advertising: Persuasive techniques'. Read ‘Marketing Marmite in the Postmodern age’ in MM54  (p62). You'll find our Media Magazine archive here.

Answer the following questions on your blog:

1) What does John Berger suggest about advertising in ‘Ways of Seeing’?

‘All publicity works on anxiety’

2) What is it psychologists refer to as referencing? Which persuasive techniques could you link this idea to?

It is the hypothetical improved self that adverts want you to believe in so that they can market to your inadequacies.

"Publicity is always about the future
buyer. It offers him an image of himself
made glamorous by the product or

opportunity it is trying to sell. The image
then makes him envious of himself as he might
be. [...] The spectator-buyer is meant to envy
herself as she will become if she buys the product.
She is meant to imagine herself transformed by

the product into an object of envy for others."

3) How was Marmite discovered?

Justus von Liebig realised brewer's yeast could be concentrated and eaten.

4) Who owns the Marmite brand now?

Unilever

5) How has Marmite marketing used intertextuality? Which of the persuasive techniques we’ve learned can this be linked to?

They make reference to pop culture and children's tv. They wanted to create nostalgia through Paddington bear and the weird fleshy looking thing called Zippy?

6) What is the difference between popular culture and high culture? How does Marmite play on this?

High culture is harder to access for regular people whereas pop culture is widely accessible. The "ma'amite" campaign spoofs the idea of higher culture with ‘By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen’

7) Why does Marmite position the audience as ‘enlightened, superior, knowing insiders’?

Their references give an audience the pleasure of getting a joke, therefore rewarding them with a sense of knowing and enlightenment.

8) What examples does the writer provide of why Marmite advertising is a good example of postmodernism?

They make satirical commentaries on today's society.

"These advertisements deployed the iconography of political culture in a postmodern pastiche."