To raise awareness and drive consumer purchase intent of SnapDragon apples in its home state of New York, Crunch Time Apple Growers partnered with Slide Nine to execute a multi-year deal with the Buffalo Bills for SnapDragon to become the official apple of the pro-football franchise. Born at Cornell University and grown across the state by over 150 family farmers, SnapDragon apples are as New York as the Bills, so it was only natural for the two to join forces.
During our third season as the agency of record, we opted to take a very targeted and regional marketing approach and reach consumers where the apples were most readily available.With that knowledge, we dug even deeper into the availability and found that some of the biggest retailers with availability were highly concentrated in the Buffalo, New York
While doing research on activities and potential partners in the Buffalo area, one thing that continually rose to the top was the activity, engagement and dedication of the Bills Mafia - the fan following of the Buffalo Bills. According to the NFL Fan Tracker 2020, Bills fans are in the top five in the NFL in categories that watched NFL highlights online, read or followed NFL-related news/info on social media and posted or shared something NFL-related on social media.With both the apple harvest season and the football season kicking off in the Fall, we knew a partnership with the Buffalo Bills would be advantageous.
To implement our plan, our team huddled together and drew up a variety of game-winning plays. We started with a teaser campaign for social media to build hype around big news that was on the horizon for SnapDragon apples. These posts served as a countdown to the Buffalo Bills and SnapDragon partnership announcement which aligned with the start of the football season. In order to increase brand awareness and in turn, increase consumer purchases, we activated the following deliverables and tactics:
The first of our multi-year campaign with the Buffalo Bills was a touchdown and extremely successful. SnapDragon apples sales revenue was up 41.8% and Buffalo-area sales were up 60%. The initial press release announcement garnered 253 media placements with an estimated audience reach of 158 million people. We also saw success with our paid social media tactics, including paid Snapchat geofilters that received 115K views by tailgaters and Bills Mafia fans and influencer partnerships with players like James Cook (@___thegreat4), which garnered a reach of 130k with over 30k accounts engaged.