Marmite pops-up again

Last Thursday Selfridges opened a new temporary store in its Oxford Street flagship. Nothing terribly unusual about that you might say, the department store has been doing this for a while now. The thing that was different about this one was that it was a follow-up to a pop-up store that opened on Regent Street in the run-up to last Christmas.

The store in question is the Marmite pop-up - a short-term venture that garnered a lot of press coverage in December 2009 and which featured everything from a female mannequin with jars of the condiment in its hair as rollers, to an old-style record turntable on which Marmite rotated endlessly. Never immune to the smell of success, let along a yeast-based spread, the marketing folks at Selfridges appear to have pounced and cleared some space for the formula before its organisers considered putting it somewhere else.

And the point is not that it is very good, it is, but that this is a very concrete example of the way in which pop-up stores are absolutely permeating the mainstream. Done well, brand owners now have the opportunity to put themselves in front of those who will give their brand an even bigger platform than they might initially have opted for.

The interesting bit is when is a pop-up store no longer a pop-up store? Is it when it pops up and becomes semi-permanent - which is exactly what has happened to the Dr Marten’s store in London’s Shoreditch, or is it perhaps when it appears and then reappears somewhere else when it has been proved to have commercial relevance?

In the case of Selfridges and the Marmite pop-up, this is a retailer that knows a good thing when it sees one and so it is little surprise to learn that there are also Marmite areas in the Birmingham and Manchester stores. The point is that this is now a seasonal area that will disappear at the end of January and there is a real possibility that if it takes money once more then who knows, we could be in a for a Bovril branch or a Vegemite villa.

The lines between guerilla pop-up stores and seasonal drives are increasingly being blurred. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but these are no longer opportunist ventures, but rather more, planned-in marketing promotions. You have to wonder at what point the term pop-up will have no currency whatsoever - although the Marmite space, whatever you may call it, is still a bit of fun.