JKR

Marmite

Marmite offers two big design lessons: the scientific use of colour and the art of exploiting a lucky bounce. Ok, so we all get the love and hate messaging. And the pack tells you it’s not a brand for the faint hearted – it’s a powerful little jar. The original trademark was a largely yellow design with accents of red and green on a cream pot (as below). The move to a glass jar revealed the black product, and retained a label bordered and capped in yellow.

The science bit: yellow and black offer the biggest colour (as opposed to tonal) contrast one can achieve. So this pack has massive impact (one reason it’s a design ‘icon’ whereas Bovril, in a similarly distinctive jar, with a lower level of contrast, is not). By luck or design, Marmite aces it on standout.

The lucky bounce: high visibility is the aim of anyone producing hazard signage. So they use yellow and black. Thus over time this colour combination takes on a particular learned meaning. Which chimes with Marmite’s persona brilliantly. All this presumably created without the Edwardian equivalent of a semiotician to assist the packaging strategy.

Visual and emotional polarity: love and hate, yellow and black, a product which carries a frisson of danger - as the guy in the A-Team used to say “I love it when a plan comes together”.

 

By Silas Amos, Creative Director, jkr. For the full article, see this week's copy of Marketing magazine.