The Marmite Effect.

When the Unilever/Tesco spat blew up a couple of weeks ago, my immediate tongue in cheek response was to tweet that it was a clever marketing ploy designed to get a lot of earned media for low involvement products like Marmite.

Fast forward to today and I found myself in an online debate with some smart people after it was revealed that Marmite sales had soared by 61% during the dispute.

To my surprise, the majority were suggesting that this sales spike was all a bonus and would be reflected in the end of year sales total.

My argument is that I doubt one single unit of marmite was sold to a new user and that what we saw was a bunch of existing customers bringing forward an imminent purchase for fear that future shortages or price rises would disadvantage them. Exactly the sort of panic buying that the article claims wasn't happening. Yeah, right.

I'm a fully paid up memeber of the Byron Sharp school of saliency and accept that the publicity would generally be a good thing, but I think Marmite may be an exception. If we're to believe their advertising, this is a product that polarises and so it might be assumed that light users are few and far between. I don't know if this is true. It's just a feeling I have and if I'm right,then the amount of genuinely new sales is going to have been tiny.

Yes sales went up 1.2% during those two days, but that's a short-term spike and the proof of the pudding will be seen in a year's time when we'll see whether annual sales have risen by 1.2%. Or more. Or less. My bet is on the latter.

We rightly attack short-term effects in marketing (especially in effectiveness award papers) but then get super excited about this extraordinarily short term incident. Sometimes, marketers just baffle me.