How to create an influential anthropomorphic mascot: Literary musings on marketing, make-believe, and meerkats

Abstract

Not long ago, Compare the Market, a UK-based online aggregator of car insurance quotes, had little distinctive presence in the marketplace. Yet the company's fortunes have been radically transformed since the launch in early 2009 of its award-winning marketing campaign, 'Compare the Meerkat', fronted by the much-loved anthropomorphic mascot, Aleksandr Orlov. This paper utilises literary insights to explain the peculiar piquancy of this popular anthropomorphic marketing campaign. To establish its consumer appeal, we conduct a literary exploration of the rich, textured experience of Aleksandr Orlov's imaginary world. In doing so, we postulate that the triumph of the campaign lies in its, albeit inadvertent, amalgamation of three literary genres: Russian literature, comedy literature, and adventure literature.

Feeling Bodies: Embodying Psychology

“…Some years ago the fictional biography of a computer-generated meerkat from a television advertisement was a UK bestseller (Orlov, 2010). This instance of the penetration of everyday experience by culturally proffered tokens has been analysed from the perspectives of marketing studies (Patterson, Khogeer, & Hodgson, 2012) and ideology critique (Khalliatt, 2013). Yet the appeal of studies demonstrating how such cultural forms can be taken up ironically, archly or subversively sometimes obscures the extent to which they are also used uncritically, unthinkingly, even unknowingly.…”

Rousing reviews and instigative images: The impact of online reviews and visual design characteristics on app downloads

“…Apps with icons containing hybrids are more persuasive compared to apps with icons containing similes or contextual metaphors. Next to visual metaphors, anthropomorphism is proposed as an effective visual rhetorical strategy (e.g., Delbaere et al, 2011;Hart et al, 2013;Patterson et al, 2013). Anthropomorphism means that human-like qualities are transferred to objects, animals, or plants that typically do not have such qualities.…”

E-commerce Platform Acceptance

“…As brand personality has evolved today, it represents the character of the brand as if it were a person, hence anthropomorphisation (Patterson and Hodgson 2013). It creates uniqueness by reinforcing those human psychological values to which consumers relate, beyond mere performance and functionality.…”