38 THE MEERKATS, THE COMPETITION
AND A HEALTHY DOSE OF NECESSITY

Sometimes the hand you are dealt in marketing doesn’t seem that attractive when you first look at it, and in the UK comparethemarket.com didn’t seem to have too much going for it in the beginning.

It had been one of the last to market, was fourth in category of four and so a small player in a category where size matters. The bigger you are in comparison insurance sites, the better. You need awareness and you need people to visit you – as visiting you is in your case the equivalent for them of visiting dozens of other sites. The traditional way to size is through advertising spend or differentiation.

Unfortunately, research found that the name comparethemarket.com was relatively unmemorable and was in fact very similar to its nearest and bigger spending competitor – gocompare.com.

Comparethemarket.com also had no single feature on which it could build a point of difference, meaning that it had to approach its marketing in a very different way.

At the time, comparison site advertising was all very similar: computer screens, cars with stars on them and claims galore – “You could save up to £300”, “We compare more insurers than anybody else”, “The price you see is the price you pay”, “Almost everybody in the country could save £XXX”…

And they shouted it very loudly: four major players shared around 1,500 TV spots a day. Not surprisingly, despite how good the product was, the advertising was lousy and everyone hated it. The opportunity wasn’t therefore a traditional USP – a unique selling proposition – but a new kind of USP: a unique selling persona. Comparethemarket decided to try and do something different; to create insurance comparison site advertising that would be entertaining and would be liked.

It drew inspiration from other insurance brands, not its direct competition in comparison sites but older standard insurance brands which had built awareness and even affection by creating and using icons. Admiral, Churchill, Direct Line all had warmer personalities depicted by people, animals and animated objects.

The final part of the inspirational jigsaw was necessity – sometimes called the mother of invention. If comparison sites want to keep costs down, they have to get people to type in their brand name. Google charges less if people search by brand name; it charges more if they search for something generic like “car insurance” or “market”. Comparethemarket needed to find a way of side-stepping the high cost per click on the generic word “market” (over £5).

It needed a cheaper term or phrase in its advertising that could exist alongside “market” and encourage people to use the brand name.

The answer was Meerkats.

And while it took a little while for Aleksandr Orlov to catch on, this complex, affection and trafic-generating character frustrated by the confusion between Comparethemarket. com and Comparethemeerkat.com, is now established as an advertising icon.

An icon with some impressive results to his name too: his first campaign achieved its 12-month objectives in nine weeks, and the brand is now number one in spontaneous awareness and consideration. Cost per visit was reduced by 73%, while quote volumes increased by over 83%.

And the moral is that you don’t have to be first to market to succeed (though perhaps being first to meerkat did help). What do you need to do to make a late entry into the market distinctive and compelling?