State Farm NFL Ads Crushing The Marketing Competition

State Farm has been all over the NFL Playoffs, with popular quarterbacks Aaron Rodgers and Patrick Mahomes serving as two of the most popular pitchmen in the marketing world.

Mahomes will play in his second straight Super Bowl Sunday when he leads the Kansas City Chiefs against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Rodgers remains one of the most popular personalities in the marketing world, raking in about $9 million annually from endorsements, according to Forbes.

The State Farm ads are funny and clever, often starring Rodgers alone, but sometimes in tandem with Mahomes. More importantly, the impact is readily apparent, the advertising metrics data firm EDO told CNBC for this story.

EDO used this example: “For State Farm, when Aaron Rodgers and Patrick Mahomes are featured in the ads during a game they’re playing in, there’s a huge boost in excess performance on a per person basis of people searching for State Farm. The ads perform two-three times better than other ads aired in those games.”

In addition, State Farm made a January 2020 move that would power the insurer through a turbulent year: It rekindled its iconic tagline, “Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There.” The 49-year-old line is among the most recognizable phrases in advertising, said Ad Age, which named State Farm a 2020 Marketer of the Year, one of 10 companies so named.

All of the marketing success is helping State Farm maintain strong brand loyalty, according to Brand Keys 25th annual 2021 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index. The index rated insurers on engagement and whether they were meeting customer expectations.

All three State Farm units -- home, auto and life -- scored high in the survey. Each quadrant on the map represents a combination of values related to predictive loyalty drivers: Emotional Engagement and Meeting Customer Expectations.

“Ideally,” noted Robert Passikoff, Brand Keys founder and president, “you want consumers to feel your brand engenders high emotional engagement and meets their expectations as completely as possible. Brands able to do that are six times more likely to create loyal customers, and loyal customers are six times more likely to give a brand the benefit of the doubt in tough circumstances.”

“Emotional engagement, the result of effective marketing communications that increases a brand’s equity, results in customers behaving more positively toward the brand,” Passikoff added. “Consumer expectations, a key dimension of customers’ brand belief-systems, are unconstrained customer desires. Expectations increase on average 22 percent a year, yet brands typically manage to achieve only a seven percent increase – a big gap between customer desires and brand promises to deliver."

For the 2021 CLEI survey, 75,804 consumers, 16 to 65 years of age from the nine US Census Regions, self-selected categories in which they are consumers and brands for which they are customers. This year Brand Keys examined 94 categories and 855 brands. Forty (40%) percent were interviewed by phone and sixty (60%) percent were interviewed online.

This report compiled by InsuranceNewsNet staff.