Comparethemarket.com — A Meerkat Built a Brand
Covers lectures
F7-04 · F7-05 · F7-09
Comparethemarket.com — A Meerkat Built a Brand
Module: F7 — Communications Strategy Type: Distinctive Asset Case Cross-references: F7-04 (creative effectiveness), F7-05 (emotional response), F7-09 (distinctive assets in communications)
The Situation
In 2008, Comparethemarket.com was the fourth-largest price comparison website in the United Kingdom, trailing behind Gocompare.com, Moneysupermarket.com, and Confused.com. Its market share was approximately 10%. The category was mature, commoditised, and locked in a war of diminishing returns: each competitor spent heavily on television advertising, each campaign looked similar to the others, and consumers struggled to recall which brand offered which service. The advertising was rational, functional, and forgettable.
Price comparison is, on its face, one of the least emotionally engaging categories imaginable. The product is a search function. The consumer visits the site, enters their details, compares prices from multiple providers, and clicks through to the cheapest option. There is no brand experience, no sensory pleasure, no relationship. The product is, in the strictest sense, a commodity. Differentiation on product grounds is nearly impossible — all comparison sites access similar panels of insurers, and the results they return are broadly comparable.
Into this category desert, in January 2009, walked a Russian aristocrat meerkat named Aleksandr Orlov. He was frustrated. People kept visiting his website — comparethemarket.com — when they were looking for a price comparison site, comparethemeerkat.com. Could they not see the difference? One compares markets. The other compares meerkats. Simple.
The campaign, created by VCCP, was absurd. It was also one of the most effective advertising strategies in the history of UK financial services marketing. Within eight months, Comparethemarket.com moved from fourth place to first in its category — a position it has not relinquished. The campaign has now run for more than fifteen years, making Aleksandr Orlov one of the longest-running advertising characters in British television.
This case examines how a distinctive character transformed a commodity brand, and what it teaches about the mechanics of creative effectiveness, emotional response, and distinctive asset building in communications strategy.
The Data
The Creative Strategy
The Comparethemarket meerkat campaign departed from every convention of financial services advertising. Where competitors ran campaigns featuring graphs, savings figures, and direct-response calls to action, Comparethemarket introduced a fictional character with a backstory, a personality, and a world entirely unrelated to the product.
The character. Aleksandr Orlov is a meerkat of Russian aristocratic heritage, proprietor of comparethemeerkat.com, a website dedicated to comparing meerkats. He is vain, slightly pompous, deeply committed to his meerkat comparison enterprise, and perpetually irritated by people confusing his website with the similarly named price comparison site. He has a sidekick (Sergei), a family history, a memoir (A Simples Life, which became an actual bestselling book), and a range of soft toy versions that became one of the most sought-after promotional items in UK marketing history.
The mechanic. The campaign's central conceit — the phonetic similarity between "market" and "meerkat" — is a piece of wordplay so simple it borders on childish. This simplicity is its strength. The idea is immediately understandable, infinitely extensible, and impossible to confuse with any competitor. It functions as what Romaniuk (2018) calls a unique and famous distinctive asset: an element that is both strongly associated with the brand and not associated with any competitor.
The emotional response. Aleksandr generates affection, amusement, and warmth. He is likeable in the way that a slightly absurd elderly uncle is likeable — not because of any rational quality, but because he is a character with genuine personality. This emotional response is precisely what Binet and Field (2013) identify as the driver of long-term brand growth. The meerkat does not persuade consumers that Comparethemarket.com has better results or lower prices. He makes them feel something positive about the brand — and that feeling, encoded in long-term memory, drives brand salience when the purchase occasion arises.
The Commercial Results
The commercial impact of the meerkat campaign was extraordinary in both speed and magnitude.
Market share. Comparethemarket.com moved from approximately 10% market share (fourth place) in late 2008 to market leadership within eight months of the campaign launch. By 2010, the brand had achieved a market share of approximately 30%, making it the largest price comparison site in the UK. As of the early 2020s, Comparethemarket.com remained the market leader in the category, with a dominant share.
Brand awareness. Pre-campaign, Comparethemarket.com's brand awareness was significantly below its three larger competitors. Within three months of launch, prompted awareness exceeded all competitors. Spontaneous awareness — a harder metric to move — showed similarly dramatic gains. By 2010, Aleksandr Orlov had achieved higher recognition than most human celebrities in UK consumer surveys.
Quote volumes. The metric that matters most in price comparison — the number of consumers who visit the site, enter their details, and request insurance quotes — increased by over 80% in the first year of the campaign. This was not attributable to product changes or pricing advantages; the product remained functionally identical. The increase was driven by mental availability: Comparethemarket.com simply came to mind more often and more favourably when consumers thought about comparing insurance prices.
Cost of acquisition. Despite the substantial investment in television advertising, Comparethemarket.com's cost per acquisition reportedly decreased as the campaign scaled. This is the efficiency effect of brand-building advertising: as mental availability increases, the cost of converting each incremental customer decreases. The brand no longer needs to fight for every click through paid search — consumers come directly, searching for "Comparethemarket" or even "compare the meerkat" by name.
The Meerkat Toys. The campaign spawned a promotional mechanic — plush meerkat toys offered to customers who purchased insurance through the site — that became a phenomenon in its own right. At various points, the meerkat toys were among the most popular soft toys in the UK, with some editions selling on secondary markets at multiples of their original value. The toys became a physical distinctive asset: a branded object sitting in consumers' homes, reinforcing the brand association with every glance.
The ESOV Analysis
Comparethemarket.com's success is a textbook example of ESOV dynamics — excess share of voice driving excess share of market.
Before the campaign, Comparethemarket.com's share of voice was roughly proportional to its share of market — around 10%. The meerkat campaign represented a significant increase in media investment, but the decisive factor was not the quantum of spend; it was the share of attention the creative achieved. The campaign's distinctiveness, talkability, and emotional appeal meant that every pound of paid media generated disproportionate attention and recall. The earned media — news coverage, social sharing, cultural commentary, playground conversations about meerkats — amplified the paid investment dramatically.
Binet and Field's analysis of the IPA Databank shows that brands with ESOV of +8 to +10 percentage points grow at an average rate of approximately 0.5% market share per year. Comparethemarket.com achieved an effective ESOV far higher than this — not through a massively outsized media budget, but through creative that punched dramatically above its weight in terms of attention and memorability.
The competitors responded with increased spend and their own distinctive characters (Gocompare's Gio Compario, Confused.com's Brian the robot), but none achieved the same combination of fame, distinctiveness, and affection. Imitation, in this case, confirmed the original's advantage: each competitor's character reinforced the category dynamic in which Comparethemarket's meerkat was the original and the others were followers.
Distinctive Asset Building
Assessed through Romaniuk's (2018) Distinctive Asset Grid, Aleksandr Orlov occupies the strongest possible position:
Fame: Exceptionally high. Aleksandr is one of the most recognised advertising characters in the UK. He has appeared in television advertisements, a bestselling book, social media content, merchandise, and promotional partnerships. The character is culturally embedded to a degree that few brand mascots achieve.
Uniqueness: Total. No competitor is associated with a meerkat. No competitor has a Russian-accented animal aristocrat. The asset is not only famous but entirely unique to Comparethemarket.com.
This places the meerkat in the top-right quadrant of the Distinctive Asset Grid: a "use or lose it" asset that should be maintained, protected, and invested in. Comparethemarket.com has done exactly this — sustaining the character across more than fifteen years of continuous campaigning, updating the stories and contexts while preserving the character's personality, voice, and visual identity.
The campaign has also developed secondary distinctive assets: the catchphrase "Simples" (complete with the meerkat's signature squeak), the "Compare the Meerkat" website (which actually exists), the plush toys, and a visual style (warm lighting, rich colour palette, comedic staging) that is consistent across all executions.
The Analysis
Why It Works: The Evidence Base
On creative effectiveness (F7-04). The meerkat campaign demonstrates that creative effectiveness is not about category-appropriate messaging — it is about emotional distinctiveness. A rational campaign about insurance comparison would have been category-appropriate but indistinguishable from competitors. The meerkat was category-inappropriate in every surface respect — and categorically superior in effectiveness. Binet and Field's IPA analysis shows that creatively awarded campaigns — those judged by peers as exceptionally creative — are, on average, eleven times more efficient at driving market share than non-awarded campaigns. The meerkat campaign won numerous creative effectiveness awards.
On emotional response (F7-05). The campaign generates a specific emotional profile: amusement, warmth, and affection. These are "approach" emotions — they draw consumers toward the brand rather than pushing messages at them. The absence of negative emotions (anxiety about price, urgency about time-limited offers, fear of missing out) is deliberate. By associating the brand with positive affect rather than purchase anxiety, the campaign builds long-term brand equity rather than short-term behavioural response.
On distinctive assets (F7-09). The meerkat is the central distinctive asset, but the campaign has built a system of assets — character, catchphrase, visual style, sonic identity (the "Simples" squeak), and physical merchandise — that creates multiple routes to brand identification. This asset system is more resilient than any single asset alone: if one element is not present (e.g., a print ad without audio), others can still trigger brand identification.
From Commodity to Brand
The deepest lesson of the Comparethemarket case is about category dynamics. In a commodity category where product differentiation is impossible, the only source of competitive advantage is brand. And brand, in a commodity category, is built almost entirely through communications.
Comparethemarket.com did not win because its search algorithm was better, its insurer panel was broader, or its user interface was superior. It won because it built a brand — a set of mental associations, emotional responses, and distinctive assets — that made consumers more likely to think of it, choose it, and return to it. In a category where the product is identical, the brand is the product.
This is Sharp's (2010) framework in its purest application. Mental availability — the probability of a brand coming to mind in a buying situation — is the primary driver of market share. Physical availability is equal across the category (all comparison sites are equally easy to access online). Therefore, the brand that is most mentally available will win the most customers. The meerkat built mental availability through emotional distinctiveness, not through rational persuasion.
The Risk of Character Dependency
The Comparethemarket case also illustrates a strategic risk: character dependency. The brand is so strongly associated with the meerkat that abandoning the character would likely trigger a significant loss of mental availability. Comparethemarket.com is, in a meaningful sense, the meerkat — and vice versa.
This creates a strategic tension. On one hand, consistency is the friend of effectiveness: sustaining a distinctive asset over time builds cumulative brand equity. On the other hand, any single asset carries risk — of creative fatigue, cultural irrelevance, or reputational contamination. If the meerkat character were to become embroiled in controversy (unlikely, but not impossible in an era of cultural sensitivity to depictions of national stereotypes), the brand would have limited fallback assets.
The evidence suggests that Comparethemarket has managed this risk effectively by evolving the character within a consistent framework — new stories, new settings, new supporting characters — rather than fundamentally altering the character or abandoning it. This is the right strategy: maintain the asset's fame and uniqueness while refreshing its creative expression.
The Questions
F7-04 Application. Analyse the Comparethemarket meerkat campaign using the creative effectiveness evidence from Binet and Field. Why was an emotionally driven, character-based campaign more effective than a rational, product-feature campaign in this category? What does this tell us about the relationship between creative strategy and category norms?
F7-05 Application. What specific emotional responses does the meerkat campaign generate? Using the emotional response frameworks from F7-05, explain how these emotions contribute to long-term brand building rather than short-term activation.
F7-09 Application. Using Romaniuk's Distinctive Asset Grid, map the Comparethemarket brand's asset portfolio. Which assets are in the "use or lose it" quadrant? Are there any assets at risk of fame decline or uniqueness erosion? How does the asset system function differently from a single distinctive asset?
ESOV Application. Explain how Comparethemarket.com achieved excess share of voice through creative effectiveness rather than media spend alone. What role did earned media play in amplifying the brand's effective share of voice? What does this case teach about the relationship between creative quality and media efficiency?
Both/And Application. The Comparethemarket case demonstrates "emotional brand AND commercial conversion." How does the meerkat campaign balance brand-building objectives with the direct-response requirements of a price comparison business? What activation mechanics complement the brand-building advertising?
Sources
Binet, L. & Field, P. (2013). The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies. IPA.
Romaniuk, J. (2018). Building Distinctive Brand Assets. Oxford University Press.
Sharp, B. (2010). How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know. Oxford University Press.
VCCP. (2013). "Compare the Meerkat: A Case Study in Creative Effectiveness." IPA Effectiveness Awards. IPA.
Wood, O. (2019). Lemon: How the Advertising Brain Turned Sour. IPA.
Ritson, M. (2019). "Comparethemarket proves the power of distinctive assets." Marketing Week.