Meerkat Case Study

Compare the meerkat.

Nowadays, the internet based business is developing very fast. It offers different kinds of goods and services and online companies are almost in every business area. One can find whatever fits his needs: b2b,c2c, b2c and others. A few years ago it was an emerging market, but today the market of online services is already full of competitors at every niche. Comparemarket.com is a website where one can compare prices for different kinds of insurance. Since the company operates on a highly competitive market, in order to differentiate itself from others, the company asked an advertising agency to create a campaign that push comparethemarket.com through the competition. As a result, they created a campaign with meerkats which was extremely successful. In this essay I’m going to discuss different aspects of it, and talk about characters in advertising campaign and what are the merits and possible problems of it.

Since the primary purposes of advertising is to inform, persuade and remind, its important to outline, how do the meerkat ads fit in this purposes. First, talking about informative advertising, compare the meerkat ads built the companies image. It made it funny and entertaining, as a result of what, the comparemarket.com became a recognizable brand associated with funny meerkats, while their competitors remained just boring websites. Talking about persuasive objective of advertising, Meerkat named Alexander was created on already existing market. The main purpose was to differentiate the product comparethemarket.com from other similar websites and to build brand preference by adding some fun to the brand. The result was astonishing, it persuaded the audience better then it was expected because the idea of using meerkats made the company to stand out of other similar websites. As a result, it left all the competition behind and went up in the rankings. Meerkat’s ads also have the reminding purpose of advertising, this meerkat ad is by itself a reminder, which tells it’s audience not to confuse to different websites. Furthermore, the thing people like a lot is meerkat’s accent and the famous “Simples!”; for instance, some people imitate meerkat’s accent, what make them think about the brand. Due to the fact the ad has funny characters, it is very catchy, hence, it maintains customer relationships and keep them thinking about the brand, so they know which website to use in order to compare insurance prices.

Speaking about message execution styles in comparethemarket.com’s ads, its clear that they use the style of personality symbol. This approach to message execution requires creating a character which represents the company; for instance P&G created Mr.Clean for their foam clean liquid.   Comparethemarket.com’s character is a meerkat who speaks with Russian accent. On the one hand, the primarily purpose of advertising is to sell, but the meerkat’s ad is not used only for this purpose. Meerkats are used to build and strengthen relationships with customers. On the other hand, some of comparethemarket.com’s ads also presents the new company’s offerings and persuades audience to buy them. Meerkats are used to make it more friendly and funny for customers and people don’t get the filling of annoying ads that just want to sell you something.