Markets and Meerkats

When choosing insurance for various products and services, there are a number of comparison companies fighting for market share.

As part of their well-known and ongoing marketing campaign, www.comparethemarket.com have added a free toy when you use their website to select insurance; this current marketing strategy if you haven’t already seen it, can be viewed here.

However, what is then interesting is to see what is currently happening to these toys once claimed by the customer (the full range of toys can be seen here). These toys cannot be purchased in usual shops so are in quite limited supply; however the demand for these toys is quite significant.

Evidence of this can be seen on Ebay, where searching for ‘compare the meerkat toy’ will reveal selling prices of anything from £50-£100 (approx) depending upon which meerkat toy is up for sale. This is a great example of a real-life market in action where people are willing and able to pay quite significant sums for products which are in limited supply - simples!