Confused.com rebrand themselves into the past.
Confused.com has recently rebranded itself, moving away from the amateur cartoon lady with a penchant for The Village People. Sighs of relief all round.
As memorable as ‘Badly Drawn Girl’ was, it has been an excruciating few years of advertising to suffer, hamstrung by the brand’s original (and probably very cost effective at the time) mascot.
So what new and exciting direction have they decided to take themselves in this time?
Weirdly they have chosen to use a robot called Brian, ‘The Fastest Insurance Comparison Robot In The World’.
Why should a robot be a weirder choice than a Meerkat? I hear you cry. Well, a couple of reasons spring to mind:
The first one being that a robot called Ziggy was actually comparethemarket’s incumbent mascot BEFORE we (and VCCP) helped them become a wildly successful soft toy company.
Here is a quote from a press release from the time:
“Visitors to the site only need to enter their details once. These are automatically saved and allow quick access to a range of quotes whenever required. A fully animated robot, Ziggy, acts as a guide through the whole online process – making it as simple and efficient as possible.” 01 January 2007
Fast forward six years and now we have Brian.
What confuses me most (pardon the pun) is that surely someone at Confused.com knew someone who worked at CTM or had been aware of this work? It didn’t work then so why should it work now?
The second reason I find it weird is that it’s clearly a move backwards in strategic terms – taking something that although pretty awful, was warm, inclusive and skewed to a feminine audience (as insurance aggregators are) and changing to something mechanical, impersonal and decidedly masculine.
Sharon Flaherty, head of PR and content at Confused.com, says that the rebrand would help emphasise the company’s heritage, which stretches back to 2002.
Flaherty adds that the character of Brian, described in a press release as ‘a technically advanced, uber-enthusiastic robot’, would have more of a story than previous brand mascot Cara.
‘It’s about getting people to learn to engage with that character, who will be developed over time in a way that hadn’t happened with Cara,’ she said.
I personally don’t want to have to ‘learn to engage’, I just want to be entertained.
The work we did with VCCP changed the sector overnight – this drags it back to where it started.
David Law