Aleksandr Orlov, a bizarre character dreamt up by Comparethemarket.com, the insurance price comparison website, has become a star in his own right with 555,000 Facebook fans and 25,000 Twitter followers.

But the aristocratic meerkat — an endearing African mongoose — has also shaken up an industry, transforming the fortunes of Comparethemarket.com and forcing rival insurers to reconsider their own marketing plans.

MoneySupermarket.com, the longest-established price comparison site, has already announced plans to “review” its advertising campaign, featuring Peter Jones, the Dragons’ Den entrepreneur. The company insists that the move is not directly related to the meerkat character, despite only introducing its Jones campaign in June.

Admiral, the insurance group and owner of Confused.com, has blamed the meerkat for a drop in its online business. The group cited Aleksandr when it revealed a 30 per cent drop in Confused.com’s operating profits to £11 million.

But for Comparethemarket.com, Aleksandr has proved big business: the creature, the creation of VCCP, an advertising agency owned by Lord Bell’s Chime Communications, has driven up traffic to the website by 83 per cent since January.

Market share of Comparethemarket.com, in terms of UK visits to the insurance category of each site, jumped by 76 per cent between January and August, according to Hitwise, the online intelligence company, while its rival MoneySupermarket.com shed 25.2 per cent, Confused.com dropped 5 per cent and GoCompare.com fell 31.8 per cent.

Industry experts said that the advert, which was launched in January and revolves around the play on words “comparethemeerkat/comparethemarket”, was a great example of advertising that has nothing to do with the product that it is promoting.

Stuart Bowden, head of planning at Mediaedge:cia, said: “Unlike countries such as Japan, we don’t do much of it in the UK — we think of advertising as a purely rational exposition on the benefits of the product or brand advertising. It is really high risk but, when it works, it tends to have a transformative effect on the agency, the client product and the industry.”

The success of the meerkat advert, he said, was partly attributed to its confident, unapologetic execution but it had also hit a “recession zeitgeist”. He said: “People just want a bit of light fun and to chat about something ridiculous. Most people hate thinking about insurance — it is a chore they need to get done ... Meerkat lets people enjoy a chore and lets them move it in their brain from something they don’t want to do to something they get some pleasure from — quite a powerful shift.”

Lord Bell has described it as being about “what makes great ideas work. It is not a formula — it is a piece of inspiration.”

A similar gamble by Aflac, the US insurance group, paid off when it launched a duck as the star of its marketing campaign in December 1999. The creature — dreamt up by an advertising team member who was apparently pacing Central Park one lunchtime repeating the company’s name out loud when he realised it sounded like a duck’s quack — squawks “Aflac” to people in the ads.

The “Aflac duck” has since become a famous American character.

Aleksandr, whose catchphrase is “seemples”, has his own website — Comparethemeerkat.com, his own Facebook page and his own Twitter following. His voice is supplied by Simon Greenall, who played Alan Partridge’s friend, Michael, in I’m Alan Partridge.

In an attempt to regain lost ground GoCompare has responded with the launch of a campaign featuring an opera singer called Gio Compario, who interrupts two men drinking coffee to sing about insurance.

Websites comparing prices on financial products, ranging from car to credit cards and loans, have become big business in recent years as a way for consumers to secure quotes quickly and easily. Of the 24 million insured cars on the road, about 12 million drivers used price comparison sites to research or buy their insurance, according to MoneySupermarket.com.

The fierce competition between price comparison sites and their growing popularity has prompted interest from the Office of Fair Trading. Last month the watchdog announced plans for a market study of the advertising tactics used by price comparison websites. It is considering, it said, examining “pricing practices which may lead to consumer detriment”.

The meer facts

The popularity of meerkats boomed in the UK after a 1987 BBC Natural History Unit documentary, Meerkats United narrated by David Attenborough.

The creature’s best-known pose is to stand erect on its hind legs with its “arms” hanging down.

A new meerkat enclosure is one of London Zoo’s most popular exhibits. The creature is a symbol for the Neighbourhood Watch scheme The animals live in extensive burrow systems with one acting as sentry on a high vantage point while others forage for food.

They live in South Africa, south of the Kalahari desert and eat insects, small mammals, scorpions and snakes A new film The Meerkats — narrated by the late Paul Newman and focusing on Kolo, a rebellious mini-meerkat and his attempts to survive in the desert — is expected to be as popular as the other recent wildlife movie hit, March of the Penguins.

Source: London Zoo, Times research

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