Category: Advertising

Touchdown or Fumble? Brand Awareness Lessons from the Most Iconic Super Bowl Ads

The Super Bowl is an event that transcends the sport of football and has become a cultural phenomenon. Over the years, the ads aired during the game have become as anticipated as the showdown on the field. Every year, companies shell out millions for 30 precious seconds of air time, hoping to capture a magical moment of brand awareness that resonates with the audience. Countless campaigns have soared to iconic status, becoming part of our everyday culture. Others have landed with a thud.

There’s so much to be learned from every marketing or advertising campaign. In this blog post, we’ll dive into some of our favorite “touchdowns” and notorious “fumbles” from past Super Bowl campaigns, extracting valuable insights into effective brand awareness strategies.

Touchdown: Budweiser’s “Puppy Love” Commercial (2014)

As dog lovers, Budweiser’s “Puppy Love” campaign definitely made our list. The commercial featured a heartwarming story of a friendship between a puppy and a Clydesdale horse. The ad resonated with viewers emotionally and received widespread praise, becoming one of the most beloved Super Bowl commercials in recent years.

The lesson: Emotional connection is king. People remember stories that make them feel something, and Budweiser masterfully tapped into that with their adorable furry friends.

Fumble: Nationwide’s “Make Safe Happen” Commercial (2015)

Nationwide’s commercial during Super Bowl XLIX, which featured a young boy lamenting all the life events he would miss due to a preventable accident, sparked controversy and backlash for its dark and somber tone. Many viewers found the ad depressing and inappropriate for a Super Bowl audience.

The lesson: Recognizing when and where your message lands is crucial. While serious messaging can be impactful, understanding the context in which your audience engages with your brand is crucial to avoid alienating them.

Touchdown: Doritos’ “Crash the Super Bowl” Campaign (2007-2016)

For nearly a decade, Doritos’ “Crash the Super Bowl” campaign invited consumers to create their own commercials for the chance to have them aired during the Super Bowl. This crowdsourcing approach generated immense buzz and engagement, with the winning ads consistently ranking among the most popular during the game.

The lesson: Don’t be afraid to empower your audience to be part of your brand story. Sometimes, the best way to promote your brand is to let your fans create their own magic.

Fumble: Mountain Dew’s “PuppyMonkeyBaby” Commercial (2016)

This bizarre concoction of a puppy, a monkey, and a baby might have aimed for quirky, but it landed squarely in the “annoying” territory. Unhinged marketing can be effective, but only when it resonates with your brand identity and doesn’t alienate your audience.

The lesson: There’s a fine line between being memorable and being off-putting. That’s why you should exercise caution and ensure that your attempts at creativity align with your brand identity and resonate with your target audience.

Field Goal: Apple’s “1984” Commercial (1984)

Apple’s iconic “1984” commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, aired during Super Bowl XVIII. While now considered iconic, this ad was initially controversial. The dark, dystopian imagery and political undertones went over some viewers’ heads, and it wasn’t immediately clear what product was being advertised. However, the ad’s boldness and originality eventually won over audiences and critics alike.

The lesson: Brand awareness can be a marathon, not a sprint. If you’re playing the long game, ensure your brand narrative is consistent and resonates with your audience over time.

Ready to Make Every Snap Count?

One of the marketing principles we constantly reiterate is that brand awareness is a journey, not a destination. It’s about consistently moving the ball down the field, learning from each play, and adapting your strategy based on the ever-changing game. So, take inspiration from these iconic ads. Celebrate the touchdowns, analyze the fumbles, and remember: the most important element is creating a brand experience that resonates with your audience long after the final whistle blows.

Want to brainstorm some winning brand awareness strategies for your business? Contact Green Apple Strategy today! We’re a team of passionate marketers who can help you tell your brand story and score big with your customers.

The 4 Best Ways to Capture Your Audience’s Attention in the New Year

Ten seconds doesn’t seem too long, right? Based on the latest study, humans have an average attention span of eight seconds. On a first date, you usually tend to give someone the benefit of the doubt if things aren’t working out exactly to your standards. With social media lifestyles today, though, there’s no obligation to give anyone even an extra second of deliberation if the content is subpar or unreliable. To keep your audience engaged, you need to connect with them instantly, so they don’t lose interest—no second chances or “dates.” So, how do you stand out with your target audience? Regardless of the type of platform that you’re utilizing to gain listener retention, here are the four best ways that you can capture your audience’s attention in your new year marketing strategy.

Speak to Your Audience’s Pain Points

For your audience to refrain from daydreaming or continue scrolling, they need to know that you are undoubtedly speaking to them. When you know your audience, you know their needs, anxieties, intentions, etc. When you focus on your target’s pain points, you confirm that you have solutions they need, which further results in increased view time, subscriber or follower rate, and customer loyalty. Today’s society and algorithms don’t allow non-relatable content to take up our space or time. Get to your point quickly by being specific, inspiring, and genuine to grab their attention immediately.

Share Relevant Content

By relating to your ideal client, you build reliability, likability, and certainty. Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customers or audience so that you better grasp what matters to them, therefore, what they want to see or experience. Consider these questions about your audience when creating your content calendar:

Why did they attend your event?
How did they receive your targeted ad?
What makes them interested in your content?
Why are you the solution they need?

By answering these questions and determining the basis of why your audience is “following” you, you’re able to speak to their emotions and cultivate connections, better yet, relationships. Test out relevant, inspirational quotes, current events, success stories, industry statistics, or even humorous content to see what your audience favors. According to Forbes, customers with a positive emotional association with a brand are 8.4 times more likely to trust the company, 7.1 times more likely to purchase more, and 6.6 times more likely to forgive a company’s mistake. As you can see, once you capture your customer’s emotions, you also gain their loyalty.

Help them Imagine the Possibilities

Using the word “imagine” or placing your audience in “what-if” scenarios automatically transports them to your desired mindset. It allows them to mentally see themselves in an imaginary world, whether you choose to make that a good or a bad place.

If you’re working on promoting your services for B2B interactions, you could ask, “What if your revenue could grow x amount in 6 months?” or “Imagine having x purchases made by the end of the year.” Positive options like these give your audience something to look forward to with their future with you.

Enhance your Visual Content

People process visual content more quickly than they process words. Additionally, 67% of consumers consider clear, detailed images to be very important and carry even more weight than the product information, full description, and customer ratings.

If you’re strategizing your social media content, create enticing graphics that speak to your target audience. Better yet, incorporate videos that tell a story. According to HubSpot, 54% of people want to see videos more than any other content in the future. Develop a connection with your audience first thing by giving them the content that they want to see.

Ready to Jumpstart Your Marketing Strategy?

The truth is, our attention spans aren’t getting any longer. Try implementing these strategies so that you can stand out from your competition and win over your target audience.

If you’re looking to enhance your marketing goals, connect to your audience more efficiently, and increase your brand awareness, Green Apple Strategy is here to help. Contact us today for a consultation.

7 Reasons You Shouldn’t Cut Your Marketing Budget in a Recession

“But, we have to cut something.” You may be feeling as though marketing is the easiest line item in your budget report to slash. We get it. As we’ve worked through this recession, Green Apple has made cuts of our own to ensure that we’re financially strong enough to serve our customers. We’re right there with you. However, cutting your marketing budget can hurt your business long-term, even when it might help it slightly in the immediate future.

To ensure that your business can continue serving its customers, you must consider a few key points. Here are seven reasons to reconsider reducing your marketing budget in a recession.

1. What if your competitors don’t?

You may consider cutting your marketing budget, but if your competitors don’t, where does that leave you? When you reduce your marketing budget, you decrease how and how often your customers see you—allowing your competitor to move in.

2. Your marketing team can help your customers support you.

The return on investment for your marketing strategy is still valid during a recession. While things are “normal,” your strategy is to drive sales and build relationships; however, during a recession, you are more focused on the relationship-building side of things and can keep your customers invested in your success. They love you as much as you love them, and they don’t want to see your business struggle. Your marketing team can help you show the right amount of vulnerability and transparency, while still sending the message that you are here to help.

3. Your marketing team protects you.

Clients often think about marketing as advertising, but it’s so much more. Your marketing team is telling your brand’s story, and that story must be shaped to align with the social climate—so as to not be insensitive or offensive. Using COVID-19 as an example, companies needed to quickly shift their messaging strategies to be sensitive and empathetic. Having a team on your side that can help shift and shape your message allows you to support your audience, while keeping your brand top of mind.

4. You don’t want your customers to feel abandoned.

Your marketing strategy strengthens your relationship with your audience. A reduction in your budget can leave your customers wondering where you went—or worse, if your business is in jeopardy of shutting down.

You will, of course, be there for your audience in a different way during a recession. Your messaging will focus on how you’re taking care of customers as the tides change. Marketing can tell your audience what you’re doing to keep their best interests in mind, strengthening their trust in your brand.

5. It may be time to launch that new product.

You have less competition during a recession, as other companies are focusing on staying afloat. They aren’t putting their time and effort into launching new products or growing their business. If you are in the position to, and you have ideas ready to launch, work with your marketing team to put your new product out into the world.

6. You will not bounce back as easily.

If you reduce your marketing efforts, it leaves you in a difficult position when you’re ready to bounce back. You’ve spent a great deal of time and money growing your brand’s reach. Rather than scaling back, discuss a strategy with your marketing team to find ways to keep your reach consistent. Once the economy is on an upswing, you will appreciate not having lost months—or years—of progress.

7. It can take you off course to meet your goals.

Even amid a recession, you still want to move forward. Your marketing team can help you keep your goals in mind and find new strategies to meet them. Don’t underestimate a marketing team’s versatility and the potential to keep your business growing, even when the economy is less than ideal.

Talk Strategy Before You Make Cuts

Before you decide on your budget, discuss all the options with your marketing team. They can likely work with you to achieve your goals, even with necessary budget accommodations. Your relationship with your marketing team should be transparent—they want to see you succeed, too, and will do everything they can to make that happen.

Ready for a marketing team with your best interests at heart? Contact Green Apple Strategy today to schedule a consultation.

The Empathy Advantage: Why Understanding Customers Fuels Better Marketing

sunlight beaming in to office onto wooden table during meeting

How do you ensure that the time and effort you invest in marketing truly impact your audience and inspire them to take the next step? This is an age-old question that every business is trying to answer.

The secret to success starts with knowing what your customers think and feel. This is why empathy is more important than ever for marketers. Without taking the time to understand what motivates your audience to take action, you risk simply creating noise that gets ignored.

At Green Apple, helping our clients eliminate the guesswork of effective marketing through customer-driven personas and strategic messaging is one of our favorite things to do. By digging deep into what truly drives customer behavior, we’ve seen businesses achieve greater engagement and growth. Here’s what we’re seeing and learning:

Why Empathy is the Key to Meaningful Engagement

Empathy isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a competitive advantage. Studies show that businesses that understand and align with their customers’ emotions achieve better results. According to a study featured in Harvard Business Review, emotionally connected customers are twice as valuable as highly satisfied ones. Engaged customers buy more, recommend your business more often, and remain loyal over time.

For small and mid-size businesses whose budgets and resources may be limited, connecting emotionally can level the playing field. By understanding what motivates your customers—their challenges, aspirations, and fears—you can create marketing campaigns that feel personal and resonate deeply. This connection inspires action, whether that’s a purchase, a referral, or brand loyalty.

At Green Apple, we help businesses uncover these insights by using empathy-driven strategies, creating marketing that truly resonates with their target audience.

5 Questions to Discover How Customers Think Without Asking Them

Even if you can’t directly ask every customer what they think and feel, there are ways to understand their mindset. By taking time to reflect on these five questions, you can unlock valuable insights to craft messaging that speaks to their needs. Let’s explore these questions with affordable, practical marketing tools to dig deeper.

1. What do your customers say and do?

Think about a typical day in the life of your customer. What are they spending their time doing? How do they behave in different settings, such as at work, at home, or with friends and family? These observations can reveal important insights about their priorities and habits.

Practical Insight Tool: Create feedback loops. Use tools like post-purchase surveys, email feedback forms, or even social media polls to ask about their routines or pain points. This provides real-world data to guide your marketing strategy.

2. What do your customers think and feel?

Consider their dreams, worries, and daily emotions. What makes them happy, sad, scared, or excited? By exploring these internal motivators, you can connects with them on a personal level.

Practical Insight Tool: Use social listening to learn more about what your customers are thinking. You can also monitor online conversations about your industry or competitors. Tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social can help you see what your customers care about, providing a glimpse into their emotional landscape.

3. What do your customers hear?

Think about the media and messages your customers are exposed to daily. Who are they listening to? What information are they consuming, and how does it shape their perceptions and decisions? Knowing this can help you rise above the noise with messaging that stands out.

Practical Insight Tool: Conduct a market analysis of their content consumption habits. Look at which blogs, social platforms, or podcasts they engage with most. This helps you identify where to meet them and how to create marketing that resonates.

4. What are their biggest challenges every day?

What frustrations or stresses do they encounter regularly? What risks or threats do they face? Understanding these challenges allows you to position your products or services as solutions to their problems.

Practical Insight Tool: Build a simple customer journey map. Outline their interactions with your brand from initial awareness to decision-making. Look for pain points along the way where you can offer solutions and make their journey easier.

5. What opportunities exist if they succeed?

Your customers see themselves as the heroes of their own stories. What do they need to feel successful? What does success look like for them, and how can your brand help them achieve it? By answering these questions, you can create messaging that inspires them to act.

Practical Insight Tool: Expand your customer journey map to include aspirations. Identify what success means to them at each stage and position your brand as a trusted partner on their journey.

Turn Insights into Action with Green Apple

By answering these questions and using tools like social listening, feedback loops, and customer journey mapping, you can develop a clear picture of what drives your customers. These insights will help you craft marketing and messaging that truly resonates, cutting through the noise to build genuine connections with your audience.

At Green Apple, we specialize in helping SMBs develop strategic marketing campaigns and messaging that align with their customers’ motivations and inspire action. If you’re ready to stop guessing and start connecting, contact us for a free consultation. We look forward to the opportunity to work together and build a marketing strategy that makes an impact.

3 Biggest Obstacles to Marketing & Sales Alignment (and How to Overcome Them)

aerial shot of three friend's hands clinking coffee glasses together in a coffee shot

Marketers have always had a love-hate relationship with sales. But, making sure your sales team feels supported and happy is essential for the relationship to be successful. If your sales team is frustrated with marketing, no one is happy. So, getting to a state of alignment is crucial.

Most marketers have issues aligning with their sales teams to create a true partnership. However, new technology and the evolving roles of both teams have created new obstacles for alignment. The good news is that there are ways to ease these burdens and create a working partnership that creates a better customer experience.

Overcoming the 3 Biggest Obstacles to Marketing & Sales Alignment

Here are three obstacles that marketing leaders find most challenging when it comes to alignment, along with some recommendations to overcome them:

1. Accountability

Being a marketer is tough. You spend a lot of time on lead generation activities, trying to generate new conversations for your sales team. Sales teams who don’t follow up with leads can be one of the biggest frustrations for marketers.

Holding sales teams accountable to follow up with marketing leads starts with making sure both teams understand their roles and expectations. It also requires developing processes and systems that enable both teams to collaborate together, even if it’s for 30 minutes a week. Some teams even put together formal service-level agreements to define the responsibilities of each team.

2. Measuring ROI

Marketers must have confidence that the strategies and tactics you’re investing in are going to help your business group. If you can’t define and quantify the role marketing plays in driving conversations for sales, it’s difficult to understand the contributions you’re making.

In order to measure the ROI of your marketing efforts, both teams must be up-front about what has worked (and what hasn’t). It’s also important to identify the specific marketing metrics that impact sales. Discovering these numbers isn’t always easy on the front end, but it’s important if you want to quantify the ROI of your marketing efforts.

3. Feedback & Data Input

Feedback from your sales team is the only way to know whether or not the leads you’re creating are worth anything. However, getting sales teams to provide feedback or update Salesforce, for instance, can be a considerable challenge.

To get ahead of this, you might need to explain why marketing and sales alignment is important. You might need to educate your sales team on what you need. It’s also important to earn their trust by coming up with quick wins for them.

When sales and marketing teams are on the same page, everyone’s job is much easier. Not only do you optimize your marketing efforts, you also enable sales teams to be more effective by creating a seamless journey from lead to customer.

How to Pivot Your Marketing without Abandoning Your Entire Strategy

a pair of black one way street signs pointing in a city

As the owner of a marketing agency, I’m constantly getting emails from frustrated business leaders asking for help. They’re discouraged because their marketing isn’t working. But, they also want to know what adjustments they could make to start gaining traction again. We also see this with our own clients—when certain tactics take time to pay off or other strategies don’t produce the results we thought would happen.

Most businesses can’t throw out their entire marketing strategy and start over from scratch. They’ve invested a lot of time, energy, and resources into their long-term plan. And, most of the time, I encourage them NOT to throw the baby out with the bath water. What they need involves finding a way to course-correct and stay on track to meet their goals.

How to Pivot Your Marketing Strategy

So, how do you balance the short-term course corrections without abandoning your long-term strategy and larger objectives? Here are a few principles I’ve seen work really well for our clients at Green Apple:

1. Build short-term adjustments into your long-term plan.

One reason course corrections can be so frustrating is because we don’t plan for them. But, if you’ve been in marketing for more than five minutes, you know things don’t always go according to plan. You can do all the due diligence, and a strategy might still fall flat.

One way to avoid the frustration of course-corrections is to proactively plan for them. Recognize there will be three to four course corrections you must make each year, and build margin into your strategy. Actually include them in part of your annual planning process. When you assume the worst and recognize there will be marketing campaigns that fall flat, you can be more proactive about building in short-term adjustments into your long-term plan.

2. Set aside a portion of your budget for testing new ideas and tactics.

Marketing is always evolving and changing. If you rely on the same strategies year after year, you’ll pay for it down the road. Therefore, it’s important to constantly test new ideas and tactics that help you reach potential customers.

A good rule of thumb is to reserve at least 5-10% of your budget for testing and learning. Whatever number you land on, it’s important to reserve funds for testing marketing tactics that could improve short-term results and provide insights for future campaigns.

3. Make it a priority to constantly measure performance and leverage data in your decision-making.

Creating a data-driven culture where everyone understands the value of data is a crucial aspect of marketing. Constantly measuring the performance of each campaign will help you know when to pivot before it’s too late. As you gather data over time, you should be able to develop a more effective long-term strategy. Ideating around strategy is fun, but measuring results leads to growth. With discipline, you can deliver both.

Bottom line: Long-term planning and short-term course corrections are both essential when it comes to effective marketing. If you are frustrated because your marketing isn’t working, make sure to evaluate which short-term methods can be executed quickly and are proven to have an immediate impact.