Fifty years of what, exactly?
Marmite has published a 50-year anniversary interview this month, which is the sort of brand-PR exercise that I would normally skim and ignore, except that there is a small problem with the maths. Marmite was first sold in 1902. It is one hundred and twenty-three years old.
So the 50 years is not the brand itself. Reading the press piece carefully, it is fifty years of a particular Unilever-era partnership arrangement and a connected design and innovation programme, dating back to the mid-1970s. That is a real thing and worth marking. It just needs the word “partnership” in the headline to make sense, and the press release does not quite do that.
This is the kind of thing the fan-site sector is for. Untangle the marketing language, then tell you what the actual story is.
What is actually worth your time
Two things, more than the headline.
First, the design archive. The Marmite jar has had real graphic-design love over five decades. The 1970s label, the 1980s “British Cuisine” range styling, the 1990s “Love it or hate it” rebrand by Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the various Diamond Jubilee, Olympic, Elton John Pride, and World Cup specials. Lay them out chronologically and you have an unusually good visual history of British packaging design at the consumer end. Some of those collector-edition jars now go for proper money on eBay.
Second, the run of brand collaborations. From the inside, Marmite has been one of the more interesting British brands at picking partners. The Walkers Marmite crisps in 2008. The Cathedral City cheese collaboration. The Joe & Seph’s popcorn this month. Each one was a small, careful experiment. None of them turned out to be a one-season stunt. That is unusual for a heritage food brand, and credit to whoever has been holding the line on which deals to do and which to politely decline.
The bit I personally remember
I should be in there too. I did tonnes of stuff for Marmite from its 100th anniversary until life got too hectic ;)
The 2002 centenary was genuinely a different scale of celebration to anything they have done since. There was a big presence at the BBC Good Food Show, a fan-club tier that I was, embarrassingly, a paid-up member of, and a run of media coverage that put the brand into colour supplements that ordinarily would not have touched a yeast extract. The 50-year version of this press piece is, by comparison, a much quieter thing.
That is not a criticism. Brands do not get to throw a centenary every decade. But if you are reading the anniversary copy and wondering why it does not feel like a proper bells-and-whistles birthday, that is why. The bells were spent in 2002.
Where to read the original
If you want the interview itself, it is on the Marmite press site, easy enough to find. It is the usual brand-anniversary read: smooth, slightly euphemistic, gives you almost no concrete numbers, but the design-archive references are real and the collaborations list is accurate.
The next genuine birthday is the 125th, in 2027, by which time McCormick may or may not own the brand. That one will be the proper one to watch.
