LOGO

Insurance price comparison site Comparethemarket.com is a brand. Uniquely, a brand packaged around comical and inexplicably Russian meerkat mascot, Aleksandr Orlov.

Objectively: irrational.

But how could you rationally market Comparethemarket? It’s difficult to distinguish one comparison site from another. Novelty is the only way to cut through. And for Comparethemarket, the novelty of its meerkats has become its USP.

Maybe Comparethemarket didn’t know it at the time, but its first meerkat campaign in 2009 was, in effect, the start of a total business re-brand. A brand that, on the surface, is less about product and more about tapping into consumer emotion outside of its core business focus, via long-tailed, furry meerkats.

If we compare-the-marketing of other comparison sites, we see they’re all striving to be ingrained in our brains, just for when they’re needed. Go Compare has its piercing opera singer; Money Supermarket has its jingle; Confused.com? Confused.com – turning noun into adjective… but nothing so elaborate as what Comparethemarket.com has got itself into.

You can determine your ideal meerkat at comparetheMEERKAT.com. Discover the imaginary meerkat homeland at Meerkovo.com, where stuffed meerkat toys, meerkat games and all round meerkat silliness are on offer. Then, once you’ve finally realised you are so over-absorbed with meerkat, go to Comparethemarket.com to do the thing you were meant to be doing.

But it doesn’t stop there. Such is the emotional impact of this brand on the affections of consumers, that the UK seems to have entered a state of meerkat mania – there’s a genuine draw towards these cute, cuddly (in reality, quite violent) creatures. Meerkat Christmas cards, meerkat TV programmes, ‘Where’s the Meerkat?’ books… you name it.

Impressive for a marketing concept so “simples”. (painful, sorry)

But when’s it going to end?

Well, I don’t know if it can! Even if the brand shifts its marketing focus (to, I don’t know, cows?), if us consumers see a meerkat or want to compare the market, those Russian-accented words will, however much we resist, be spoken in our heads. Worse still, we might even say them out loud with pseudo-irony, whilst our ashamed, embarrassed friends shake their heads in disappointment. Now that would be painful.

Right now, let’s just (try to) enjoy the irrationality of it all.