Crocs vs Meerkats: The latest price comparison smackdown

This Saturday’s Grand Final of the Masked Singer provided a fascinating showdown of the UK’s ‘Big Four’ Price Comparison brands (or is it ‘Big One and Three Medium-Sized?’)

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OK, so it’s not the Super Bowl but it’s about as prime time as it gets in this country and the show itself is a great deal more enjoyable for simple folk like me (spoiler alert: Piranha was incredible and a very worthy winner!)

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I found it fascinating on a couple of different levels:

1. From a broader business point of view: the price comparison business model is unique and this is a uniquely British success story that should be celebrated. This is a category that emerged nearly 30 years ago and now comprises 4 leading sizeable brands with a combined market cap of over ￡10bn (I would guess) It’s a category that barely exists outside of the UK and is a prime example of our country’s genuine world-beating success within fintech – still very much a feature to this day.
2. From a marketing and advertising point of view, these are some of the biggest spenders on advertising in the UK and they have competed with each other fiercely for decades now. More than other business models, effective advertising is make-or-break and advertising as a % of revenue is way higher than the average for other companies. Each brand has a near-identical proposition so the name of the game is hoovering up the highest volume of customers and selling them on to insurance (and other) companies as qualified leads.

Having spent two highly enjoyable years at MoneySuperMarket myself, I feel well placed to pontificate and share some highly subjective opinions on this latest batch of creative executions. Feel free to disagree!

A key thing to note up front is that there is one fundamental key to success in price comparison and it’s brand salience, aka ‘name fame’. The core product is car insurance comparison which most people need to think about for a week or two once a year when it comes time to renew. This can happen at pretty much any time of year and the first one (maybe two) brand name that comes to mind for a customer wins. More than any other category, strong consistent branding over time and across different media with a multitude of brand assets is crucial. Coupled with a high level of media spend every week of the year. One brand has done this brilliantly for years. The others not so much.

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Here goes...

The Meerkats – I didn’t spot them during the show which either means I wasn’t paying full attention or they are like Donald Trump in the Republican Primary debates. Even if they don’t show up, everyone’s thinking about them anyway. The meerkats have been going for nearly 20 years and this has to be one the most successful UK ad campaigns ever, cementing Compare the Market as the dominant brand in the category.

Confused – apologies to anyone involved, but I’ve never been a fan of Confused’s advertising primarily because it’s…confusing. The brand name itself doesn’t help and while clearly a lot of money has been spent on this production set in a big Roman amphitheatre, it’s quite a weird ad concept with no relation to the category. And they’ve added in a prairie dog eating a sandwich, presumably to make it ‘memorable/interesting’

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MoneySuperMarket – a brand close to my heart but one I think has lost its way in recent years. While they seem to have been more consistent and well branded on some level (lots of purple, national treasure Judi Dench) there hasn’t been a truly memorable ad from this brand for many years and the current campaign generally comes across as a bit obvious and forgettable. This latest ad in the series was also very focused on how many free discounts you can get (must have been at least 5 mentioned in 30 seconds) which suggests to me a lack of a strong idea and a bit of desperation for short term results?

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Go Compare – I must say, this new campaign has to be one of the best they’ve ever done and one of the best of the lot right now, just getting a lot of things right. It’s a new campaign but they’ve been smart enough to retain the fundamentals of what’s worked in the past (ie, the teeth-grindingly annoying Gio Compario, their strongest brand asset by miles) They’ve added in a heart-warmingly light-hearted main character who has a great time sorting out his various insurance policies while dancing around the house (AND in Crocs!) It’s light-hearted, memorable, well branded, covers a wide range of insurance products effortlessly (not just one) and strikes the right balance of emotional and rational messaging. Ten out of ten for me!

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So there you have it. My highly subjective and unsubstantiated conclusion: put your bets on Go Compare to win and for the Meerkats to be quaking in their boots ever so slightly.