Educating retailers
about the differences between price comparison sites

The strategy was designed to target the top 500 retailers mapped by job title. Fieldworks’ main aim was to educate retailers about the difference between a search engine and a price comparison website, and demonstrate how Pricesearcher (PS) could help alleviate retailers’ pain points. Central to this is the difficulty of ensuring your products would appear in front of those consumers who were actively looking for the products you sell without paying extortionate advertising price via PPC (pay per click) or paid search – a departure from the Google shopping and Bing operating models.

• Fieldworks commissioned original research of 2,000 UK consumers to find out their perceptions of search engine and price comparison websites, demonstrating confusion around product listings and transparency around the PPC and paid search model.
• This was matched with insightful commentary developed by Fieldworks, positioning PS as a thought-leader whose understanding of product pricing was helping to shake up the market and create a level playing field for retailers, large and small.
• The campaign was launched with a news generation sell-in targeting the retail technology trade press announcing that the consumer research had showed shoppers were unaware that they were not getting the whole picture when they undertook online product searches.
• The research was then used to inform a series of thought leadership articles placed in the trade press focusing on the need for innovation, online transparency and fairness where product pricing was concerned.
• This was complimented by an in-depth interview in the Independent with Samuel Dean, challenging Google’s operating model and ethics, where shopping search was concerned. A second interview was set up with Computer Weekly, which has a core readership of IT and ecommerce directors, one of PS’ key target audiences.
• Leveraging their customer user cases an interview was set up with Robert Kulawik, COO at Everything5pounds.com giving the retailer’s view on the benefits of using PS as part of its marketing strategy.

Throughout the campaign, we positioned PS as a disrupter, which was levelling the playing field by indexing every product by price rather than just showing the prices of those products that retailers were prepared to advertise in Google or Bing. To make this proposition easy to understand we termed the coin that Pricesearcher was ‘the YouTube of prices’ something retailers, journalists and consumers could easily understand and identify with.

In just three months, Fieldworks secured 31 highly targeted pieces of coverage in media mapped to specific job titles, 80% over its KPI. 92% was in Tier one media (+22%) and 55% included a backlink (+10%). More importantly, two national retailers indexed all their products on Pricesearcher.
As well as being picked up in retail trade and business horizontal press, Fieldworks secured coverage in the Sun, who ran an article about how consumers could find the best deal in the run up to Black Friday. PS was prominently displayed in two articles. This not only promoted the benefits of PS to consumers, resulting in an immediate spike in searches on the PS platform; but demonstrated to retailers it provided a fair platform to promote products as they are listed purely based on price and availability, not budget spent by a brand or retailer to promote an item, thus giving consumers an accurate picture.