Even Mr. Granger, who spends part of each year in London, said he always kept a supply of Vegemite on hand for his children.

Image Kraft originally chose the name iSnack2.0 from almost 50,000 entries in a competition to name its new Vegemite product, but then bowed to public anger and agreed to call the product Cheesybite. Credit... Kraft Foods/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Simon Talbot, the head of corporate affairs at Kraft Foods Australia, said the company had taken only 72 hours to decide that the iSnack 2.0 name was “not worth defending,” given the level of outrage.

But the furor was already paying dividends: Sales of iSnack 2.0 rose 47 percent during its first two weeks with the name, while sales of the original Vegemite were largely unaffected. (Jars with the Cheesybite name will appear on shelves only after Kraft unloads about 500,000 jars printed with the iSnack 2.0 name — in two or three months).

“In the first week, we were in 15 percent of Australian households, which is unheard of. It usually takes many months to get that sort of impact,” Mr. Talbot said. “Time will tell the success of the product, but to date, the lack of cannibalization of the core product and the level of new uptake indicates that we’re onto a very, very successful winner for us.”

The executives at Kraft chose iSnack 2.0 to reflect the fact that the product had been developed using information gleaned from thousands of online surveys indicating that customers wanted a more portable, spreadable, snack-able version of Vegemite.

But a marketing concept that lives by the Internet can also die by the Internet.

“We asked people to vote on a name, and then we left the room and picked a name that wasn’t the most popular, and that’s where we lost the online consumer in particular,” Mr. Talbot said of the iSnack name. “The underlying success is that we got the mix right: We got the taste right, we got the insights right. The sales data proves that.”