Whilst watching TV last night with a friend I saw the 2nd excellent comparethemeerkat.com advert, and although we both laughed he said he couldn’t see the point of the advert. On the surface it does look like a bit of a random advert with no prices, no ‘limited time offers’ and no attempt to give the viewer a reason to buy from comparethemarket.com.
It may not be the traditional hard sell we associate with comparison websites, but that is exactly the point. Instead what it does do is…
Make the brand stand out in a highly competitive and crowded market
The price comparison market is saturated with a lot of big spenders competing for market share. Traditionally adverts have focused on themes such as how much you can save or (this is my favourite) their “unique 5 star rating”, which makes it hard for consumers to differentiate between them all when they all sound the same. No one can mix up Comparethemeerkat.com with gocompare.com.
Differentiate the brand in a market containing few USPs
A price comparison is a price comparison site no matter how you try and dress it up, with little room for product innovation. With prices controlled by the suppliers, the comparison sites have very little to set themselves apart. Recent moves have been to stream line the UI or add user reviews, but those are easy to copy. All that is left is the marketing, and Comparethemarket.com has stolen a march.
Give people something to talk about – the famous “Water cooler effect”
The holy grail of adverts is to get people talking about the advert unprompted and in their own free time with friends and colleagues. A new addition to this is the ability of those who haven’t seen the advert being able seek it out on YouTube to see what the fuss is about (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ust9YBlEfY).
Generate incoming links from blogs and articles like these!
If you do a search for “compare the meerkat” you’ll see I am not the first to blog about this advert, and all those links will surely be re-directed to the main site once this campaign is finished.
Applying this to your website
Few website ideas are original anymore, and if you have one kudos! They are either a me-too, a slant on a site that already exists or they focus on a niche covered more broadly elsewhere. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t create the site or that you can’t compete, it means you have to think outside the box to gain traction.
Why doesn’t everyone do this? One, when there is money involved it takes a heck of a lot of confidence to commit to something that goes against the grain of what everyone else is doing, and two, more often than not the person who has the final say is rarely a marketer.
As an aside, confused.com has done right thing bidding on the related keywords in an attempt to grab some of the traffic with purpose written adverts. The only surprise is at the time of writing others haven’t followed. (Note how many insurance companies bid on Norwich Union’s “Quote me happy” in comparison (http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=quote+me+happy&meta=)
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