MARMITE: LOVE CAFE

The Marmite Love Café was all about separating the lovers from the haters – literally.

Borrowing iconography from the hippy festival culture of the Sixties to mirror the brand’s new “Summer of Love” jar design, the café was built around a custom-designed algorithm able to evaluate language and interactions within an individual social user’s profile that denoted positive or negative emotion, and decide whether they were a “lover” or “hater”.

Those deemed to be “lovers” would be given free coffee and Marmite and cheese toasties – turning social sentiment into actual social currency.

W’s digital team constructed a proprietary ‘Love-o-Meter’ – a retro-styled computer console that could analyse café patrons’ Twitter handles within seconds. If they were constantly tweeting about how #awesome everything was, then the goodies were on us. If they were mostly sending snide remarks to @ASOS then they had to foot the bill.

To capture the biggest possible footfall, and position the activity among our bullseye audience of urbanites who would help us amplify the Love Café via their own networks, we partnered with London’s Shoreditch Grind co ee company and installed the Love-o-Meter in its new Soho shop for a week-long residency.

Reaching more than 1 million people via social channels and 42.7 million people through press coverage, The Love Café served more than 1,000 Marmite and cheese toasties to hungry “lovers” (with more than 400 250g jars of Marmite consumed during the process).