I Like Your Old Vegemite Better Than Your New Vegemite
Could the new label look like this? Image: Sweded
From The Enthusiast’s unAustralian Department comes the news that there’s a new recipe for Vegemite. In response to a 30,000-response “census” commissioned by Kraft, people wanted the quintessential Aussie yeast extract to be easier to spread, and palatable without the addition of butter.
Enter a “smooth, velvety” mixture of Vegemite and cream cheese. Apparently it’s intended to be eaten as a dip. Are they mad?
Here at The Enthusiast we fear change and can only cope in this hurly-burly world if everything stays just as it was when we were Gen-X babies watching TransFormers on The Early Bird Show.
Just kidding! This might actually improve Vegemite. The Australian icon is also a savage mistress. Most Australians quickly learn to use it sparingly and to combine it with other flavours, so that they don’t get an uncompromising mouthful of pure black saltiness.
Butter is actually crucial for enjoying Vegemite, as it cuts the flavour and makes it more spreadable. Cheese and Vegemite are also culinary buddies – as the good folk at Baker’s Delight will tell you. This Enthusiast is a particular fan of what’s sometimes called “crazy toast”: Vegemite and avocado on toast. The avocado provides creaminess, while the Vegemite seasons the bland fruit.
The sticking point, it seems, will be the rather American prospect of blending these ingredients together in the one jar, PB&J style (with a baseball bat?). Indeed, the new Vegemite seems suspiciously friendly to international palates. Only 2 per cent of Vegemite sales come from outside Australia. That’s one hell of an untapped market.
Still, it’s a PR win for Kraft (and for Stan Lee from Brand DNA, who worked on the launch). Because the product is so iconic, people feel they have a personal stake in it; even Kraft recognises this. And as we’ve written before, consumer nostalgia is a powerful engine that manufacturers need do very little to get running.
So it is with New Vegemite. In an exercise reminiscent of the spread’s own origin, the name of the new product will be decided in a public competition, with tickets to the Grand Final being offered as the prize. Hopefully the winner will be decided in a more considered way than the original: the name “Vegemite” was drawn from a hat back in 1923.
Kraft has some official name suggestions already: I Just Mite, Vegelite, Vegesmooth, Moomite and Velvetmite. These are all terrible.
The Herald Sun went all Doobie Brothers and “took both Vegemites to the street to see which consumers preferred”. (Their sample of two was inconclusive.) Lisa Wilkinson and Karl Stefanovic spent a lengthy segment this morning discussing the new product on Channel Nine’s Today show. (Apparently they suggested it be named “Butt Cheese Mite”.)
But you’d best believe the Twitterverse and the News.com.au commenterati were up in arms! Lauren Edwards was unimpressed: “Messing with Vegemite after 85 years is a big mistake.” Jason Cupitt was disappointed: “it’s VEGEMITE! Don’t touch it.” And in Queensland, Ipswich city councillor Paul Tully opined: “The new cheesy spreadable version will be for wusses. Give me the original, rancid, true Aussie, ‘knock ya dead’ version any day.”
The Enthusiast’s favourite comment? “From the looks of the photo of the kid, It should be called ‘Magic S**t sandwiches,” wrote Mario Gazza of Chadstone on the Herald Sun website.
Other Herald Sun commenters highlighted the cynicism of this user-generated branding exercise. Peter Davids of Hawthorn wrote: “A ticket to the Grand Final? For a name that will eventually go onto millions of jars for years to come! How about Mitecheap?”
Meanwhile, Dean Kennedy of Moonee Ponds suggested: “Kraft should pay the equivalent of what they’d pay to have this brand name conceived commercially… so that’s at least a Grand Final suite for 10 people with full catering, flights from anywhere in the country and put up for the accommodation too for a couple of nights!”
Will New Vegemite be our answer to New Coke? Time will tell. As any first-year marketing student can tell you, rebranding fiascos happen when consumers’ relationship with the old product is disrupted, or when their expectations of the new product are mismanaged. In a notorious 2001 case, the British postal service decided to rebrand itself Consignia in order to attract international business and make it seem corporate rather than bureaucratic. The trouble was that Britons do see their postal service as a national institution, and the name was quietly dropped the next year in favour of the old one, Royal Mail.
Vegemite is in 70 per cent of Australian homes – and interestingly, now the other 30 per cent has taken this opportunity to express a previously sacrilegious sentiment: “I don’t really like Vegemite.” Some on Twitter are confessing that they prefer Marmite, Promite or even the gluten-free Vegemite substitute produced by Freedom Foods.
“My family only eat Australian Owned. We stopped eating Vegemite when it was bought by the US company Kraft. Now we eat an Aussie owned brand,” posted Roger at the Herald Sun.
But ultimately, Trevor Topfer had the most sensible take on the matter: “All is well with our world when the headline news story is a change to the flavour of Vegemite.”
What about calling it Parwill? It was called that for a few years in the early twentieth century.
Are rebranding efforts so expensive and ponderous that companies have to rely on the Great Unwashed?
This sounds like the current Smith crisps campaign ‘Do Us A Flavour’, where they’re asking the general populace to dream up a better flavour than ‘hamburger’ or ‘hotdog’ (not that I wouldn’t want to taste both of those, possibly at once!).
At least Smiths are offering competition winners 1% of all sales in addition to $30 large. I wonder how many Grand Final tickets that could buy?
As I am currently living overseas, I would mostly just appreciate if Vegemite was still intact when I return home.
Nevertheless, I suspect this new idea could ‘take’ with Germans. They have their own quirk with bread toppings, ‘quark’. (Which they, like Australians, need to track down in specialist places when they leave their homeland.) It’s almost like cream cheese, almost like yoghurt. But isn’t quite — it’s available in plain, fruity and herb-infused varities. Maybe the cheesy Vegemite could make inroads.
The Dutch are also a bit kooky with their spreads, leaning to sweet rather than salty (icing sugar and cinnamon, little sugary aniseed beads).
But they eat salt liquorice and pickled herrings and I still can’t convince my Dutch father to eat Vegemite. Maybe now that he’s been naturalised I’ll try again.
Hmmm, Grand Final tickets are definitely a bit of a bogus prize for branding a new product. But on the other hand a public competition is in the spirit of the Vegemite brand, and it also flatters people that they ‘own’ the brand, which is for the best considering that Vegemite is such a high-stakes brand.
Ben, I probably should have mentioned in the story that Vegemite Classic will still be available – this isn’t a straight swapsie. Also, I used to see quark listed as a recipe ingredient and go WTF? Recipes would always suggest substituting light cream cheese.
Quark is delicious and quite easy to make at home (not to be consfused with sub-atomic particles).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(cheese)
However, cream cheese and vegemite is SACRILEGE and not to be tolerated.
Still, if they insist, the only sensible name that all Australians could get behind is ‘Vaginamite’. Who’s with me?!
Only if they also release penis butter.
*snigger* RELEASE.
Gold! Gold for Australia!
If the general population are keen for it, then I’m all for Vaginamite and Penis Butter. But, this philly cream cheese/vegemite combo is just wrong. WRONG!
I love you guys.
Well thank goodness they haven’t mixed it with the phili and sweet chilli stuff.
Leave Vegimite as it is. Come on, it just aint vegimite if you go mixing in a load of cream cheeze.
And what this about it being hard to spread? If you can’t manage spreading vegimite then you shouldn’t be let near a butter knife.
C’mon, they not replacing Vegemite, it’s an additional product line. From the media reports, it tastes quite nice. Looks like chocolate too, very clever Kraft!
Horrifying news everyone: New Vegemite is to be known as iSnack 2.0. I checked the date and it is indeed 26 September and not 1 April, so it seems this is no prank.
Its sheer wrongheaded awfulness almost needs to be admired: not only was there never such a snack as iSnack 1.0, and not only is it embarrassingly dated and uncool to piggyback on Apple terminology, but this is also not even remotely a tech-related product!
Vegemite should NOT carry the halal stamp!!!!!!
I will never buy vegemite again.
Honestly, Mary! If a product happens to meet certain dietary restrictions then it’s just sensible to indicate as much so that you don’t lose customers who follow those diets. Same with products that are kosher, that are vegan and that are gluten free.
An objection to Vegemite being marked halal is a racist one, and I would suggest you have a read of our article on the absurdity of Australian nationalist hatred.