The “launch”
On 1 April, in a year I have decided not to dignify by looking up, the Marmite and Vaseline teams together announced a limited-edition product: Vaseline Lip Therapy with Marmite. Promotional materials. Quotes from brand managers. A claimed exclusive Facebook availability. The whole apparatus of a real consumer-goods launch.
The internet, predictably, divided into two camps. The first camp said “of course this is fake, look at the date”. The second camp said “no, wait, this actually sounds plausible” and went looking for the Facebook page.
Why it was clever
The reason the joke worked is that Marmite, more than almost any other British brand, will plausibly do absolutely anything. Marmite peanut butter, real. Marmite cashews, real. Marmite chocolate, real. Marmite popcorn, real. Marmite roast potato snacks in a bag, real. Marmite caramel sauce in a Christmas range, real. At what point in that list do you stop and decide the next thing on it is fake?
The Vaseline crossover sat exactly on the line of plausibility. Salty, dark, vaguely savoury lip balm sounded ridiculous, but it sounded ridiculous in the specific way that all of Marmite’s actual limited editions sound ridiculous before you actually find them on shelves.
That is what made the prank land. The joke was on the audience for being unable to distinguish a fake Marmite stunt from any of the real ones.
What the campaign actually achieved
A small amount of free publicity for both brands. A nice piece of social media content. A test of how far the Marmite brand could be stretched into completely unrelated product categories before someone called the bluff. The answer, helpfully, turned out to be: a long way.
Whether the Marmite team have ever thought about doing the joke for real is a separate question. A Marmite lip balm is not, structurally, much madder than Marmite caramel sauce. The lip balm just has a higher barrier to entry because lip balm consumers are not Marmite consumers, and the product would have to find shelf space in a category Marmite has no other presence in. The caramel sauce makes sense because M&S can put it on the food-aisle shelf next to other Marmite products. The lip balm would be alone in Boots, on a shelf with no friends.
So probably it will stay an April Fool. But you can never quite be sure.
The Hate Party, of course, will assume that any product with Marmite in it is an April Fool every day of the year. We have learned to ignore them.
Source: contemporary coverage, Red online, the original Vaseline-Marmite April Fool campaign.
