A brand is a complex organism. This is part two in a series of articles in which we examine a successful brand's component parts.

Elements of a Successful Brand 2: The Tagline

Businesses put an awful lot of pressure on their taglines. Corporations endow them with colossal significance. And advertisers expect them to seal every deal like a kiss. Yet many business taglines fall flat and fail to engage us. This is a pity, because a tagline can speak to an audience with authority and elegance. At their best, these pithy phrases introduce us to the brands they represent and beckon us to linger a while and listen.

In this article, we'll address three critical questions: What is a tagline supposed to do? What goes into a good one? And how does the tagline fit into an overall brand strategy?

What a Tagline Does
A tagline is designed to elicit a response from its audience. An effective tagline should do some or all of the following:

• Clarify (what you do, how you are positioned, etc.)
• Express an important brand attribute
• Support your positioning
• Help people recognize and remember you

In the next section, we'll explore these elements in more detail.

Deconstructing the Tagline

Clarify
A tagline that states the obvious or raises questions simply is not doing its job. Think of a tagline as an opportunity to articulate your differentiation, express your personality or convey some other important brand quality.

Examples:
> The Land Lawyers (Walsh, Colucci, Lubeley, Emrich & Walsh)
> Business furniture that works (925 Business Furniture)
> Creating Pivotal Brands (Hinge)

Express an Important Brand Attribute
Every brand worth its salt stands for something—a point of differentiation or a competitive advantage that stimulates interest and builds loyalty. Your tagline is a terrific place to explicitly call out this crucial brand attribute.

Examples:
> Think Different. (Apple, known for its culture of continual innovation)
> Find the value of X (Xiameter, Dow Corning's value-priced silicone products brand)

Support Your Positioning
A tagline is most helpful to a brand when it is used to support the brand's positioning. If you are different in some way, why not say so through your tagline?

Examples:
> We try harder (Avis, the #2 car rental company)
> The ultimate driving machine (BMW, known for its great driving experience)
> All we do is Work (Jackson Lewis, an employment and labor law firm)

Support your Brand
If you pay attention to such things, you'll notice that an awful lot of companies out there either use ineffective taglines (see sidebar) or avoid them entirely. This is a mystery to us because a tagline is one of the few ways a company can explicitly articulate its brand promise. Admittedly, writing a great tagline can be a struggle, but once it's in place, it adds a potent extra dimension to your brand.

8 Ingredients of a Great Tagline

1. Keep it short
2. Convey a single simple idea or benefit
3. If possible, be specific
4. Be sure your claim is believable
5. Avoid generic or cliched statements that could apply to other businesses
6. Support or explain your positioning
7. Make it memorable
8. Stick with your tagline for the long haul

When developing a tagline, stay away from ideas that are vague, bland, stale, or untruthful. And try to avoid making a statement that could just as easily describe a competitor. Remember, a tagline should make you stand out like, well, a thumb of approval. Unfortunately, many taglines—especially in the professional services—are limp, do-nothing slogans.

Let's look at taglines in use today that aren't helping their businesses.

"We make sure"
(Fujitsu Siemens)
The obvious response to this tagline is "Okay. You make sure of what?" The statement is so incomplete and bizarre that we aren't sure at all what to make of it. A tagline that raises unintended questions is not helping your brand.

"Helping clients succeed"
(Booz Allen Hamilton)
Well, for the fees they charge, we would hope so! This blandest of platitudes raises a big question: do they have the imagination to help me succeed?

"A passion for the business of accounting"
(Grant Thornton)
It's great that they love their jobs. But what about us, the prospective client? What does this tagline tell us that would motivate us to choose Grant Thornton over another local or Big 4 accounting firm? (Spoiler hint: nothing at all.)

These are large, market-leading companies, but their taglines, like their overall brands, are watered down so that they won't offend—or impress—anyone.
 

Next Issue...

Elements of a Successful Brand 3: Personality

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