» Where Does Brand Fit In Your Marketing?

I was talking to the owner of a very diverse and competitive business this week who said, and I quote (best as I can recall):

Since the downturn, branding is dead. All that matters is making sales.

Well, I have a case study that shows that not only is branding not dead, it actually helps you make sales …

Take a look at the car insurance industry. What do you see?

• Highly competitive
• “Need” rather than “Want”
• A chore to buy
• Dry, boring, commodity
• Driven by direct response advertising
• Price sensitive consumer

Hardly surprising that convenient and efficient cost comparison sites have been popular since the big boom in home internet use.

And now there are a lot of them around, all competing for attention and customers (1,500 UK TV spots a day!). In their own words …

The truth is that to all intents and purposes all the sites are the same.

‘You could save up to £300′, ‘We compare more insurers than anybody else’, ‘the price you see is the price you pay’ ‘almost everybody in the country could save’.

Everybody’s facts and benefits were the same. By increasingly focussing on ‘differentiating’ claims in advertising all the sites increasingly blended into one.

How can these “commodity” services stand out in such a high-competition market?

Our only option was to do something different. In a context where the competition are perceived to be irritating and disliked if we could entertain and get people to like us then we might just be able to stand out.

In order to help convince you that this is a break through – at the time of writing this paper all our competitors are still battling it out on the same generic claims.

Aleksandr Orlov was born a loveable but complex character who is desperately frustrated by the confusion between Comparethemarket.com and Comparethemeerkat.com.

As a result the love people have for Aleksandr has had an outstanding impact on the fortunes of the brand.

After the creation of Aleksandr, planning on ‘Meerkats’ moved into another phase. Our aim has been to place social media at the very heart of the campaign.

Compare the Meerkat Social Media Character

We wanted to create and facilitate hundreds of conversations about Aleksandr Orlov, comparethemeerkat.com and comparethemarket.com. We also wanted Social Media to be the “glue” that integrated and linked together the ATL and Digital aspects of the campaign. With that in mind, it was critical that the Social Media components were absolutely integral through out the campaign and not a media bolt-on. We concentrated primarily on Facebook and Twitter.

The clever (and risky) strategy was to create a fun and remarkable character that consumers could warm to, finding a unique place in the target market’s mind and making the brand more memorable and increasing recall. That recall translated into more traffic and lower cost per click (from £5 to £0.05 according to the case study). Using multiple channels this warmth is turned into greater awareness and brand stickiness, plus the outragious viral appeal amounts to tons of free visibility … proof of which is in this very page.

You might be thinking “that’s all very fun but show me the money!” …

• The campaign achieved all of its twelve month objectives in 9 weeks
• It is now number 1 in spontaneous awareness and consideration
• Its cost per visit has been reduced by 73%
• Quote volumes have increased by over 83%

You can read the full case study here and thanks to Patrick for pointing it out.