Does it come in any other colours?

Vegemite is a storied Australian brand name. Products don’t often transcend to become brands in their own right, but for generations of “happy little Vegemites” – of which I was proudly one, Vegemite held a beloved place in my psyche and cupboard shelf.

Vegemite made a homesick Australian feel a little less so. Gave me great joy to watch the facial expressions of people introduced to it overseas – something like a cross between sucking lemons and taking a salt chaser to a tequila shot! Helped me recover from many a hangover, and along with Tim Tams and Disprin it was the must smuggle item at the bottom of the suitcase from trips back home.

So how did it all go so wrong?

With such a storied past and well-spring of affection it would seem like a slam dunk to come up with a great name for the “new” Vegemite product about to hit the supermarket shelves. The original name was famously chosen from a public competition, and so too the new product was to be named.

Well, maybe we have become a society bereft of creativity, because the new name is not only an affront to the proud tradition of the product brand it springs from, but is guaranteed to alienate and offend in the process. Over 48,000 entries and the very best option was… iSnack 2.0.

Say what?! In fact say alot might be more appropriate. After the name was revealed during the AFL Grand Final on Saturday, Twitter lit up like a Christmas tree and it wasn’t good. There is already a whole blog dedicated to the utter awfulness of the new name. A quick search of Twitter for the new name quickly reveals the creativity so absent in the name itself – a personal favorite RT @Doogsta: Does iSnack 2.0 come in any other colours beside black?

There is a school of thought that goes any publicity is good publicity as long as you aren’t in handcuffs, and if that is the case then maybe the people at Kraft are crazy like a fox, because they have garnered far more PR yards from the true awfulness of the name than they would have if it had been something people actually liked…

And names aside, Kraft does have alot riding on the new product. As Coke discovered with the New Coke debacle in the 80s, when you monkey with a beloved original, the masses aren’t always keen to come along for the ride.

In Coke’s case they rebounded and today there are many out there who think New Coke was just a marketing ploy to pump up flagging interest in the brown fizzy stuff. In their case it worked. If Vegemite is trying for the same strategy it’s a dangerous gamble. People who have tasted the new concoction of Vegemite and cream cheese are split about its appeal.

And while millions of dollars in advertising can mask a multitude of sins, it is possible the new product will fail for reasons totally unrelated to the atrocious name – because it actually has LESS nutritional value than its predecessor, a death knell today with more health-conscious consumerism on the march.

For me – being a bit of a traditional kind of girl, I think I will stick with Vegemite 1.0.

See you next week!

Michel Hogan is a Brand Advocate. Through her work with Brandology here in Australia and in the United States, she helps organisations recognise who they are and align that with what they do and say, to build more authentic and sustainable brands. She also publishes the Brand thought leadership blog – Brand Alignment.