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Taglines, a misused and misunderstood marketing tool

Written by: Keith Thirgood

Article Overview: Pity the poor tagline. Dismissed as a mere slogan, hampered by a boring turn of phrase, ignored by “serious� business people. It’s a wonder an honest, effective tagline even gets up in the morning.

Taglines, a misused and misunderstood marketing tool

Pity the poor tagline. Dismissed as a mere slogan, hampered by a boring turn of phrase, ignored by “serious” business people. It’s a wonder an honest, effective tagline even gets up in the morning. A tagline is more than a slogan. It’s more than a description of what a business does. Along with your company name and logo, the tagline is a verbal representation of your brand. Every business should have a tagline. A tagline can actually improve your odds of getting more business. Its value goes straight to your bottom line.

A tagline can clarify. It can inspire. It can reassure. And it must carry your brand.

However, it can also be forgotten. Or worse, it can drive business away. It all depends upon a few little words.

A tagline can be a doctor, rescuing an otherwise obscure business name. For instance, one of my clients had a very obscure company name. The name was meaningless to most of their prospects.

If this company simply used their name, Hotel Carousel, with no tagline, you wouldn’t have a clue about what they did, nor of the value they brought to their clients. However, we gave them a clarifying, memorable tagline.

Hotel Carousel,The fun financial workshop

The branding was spot on. You know they’re in training. You know they’re training relates to financial issues. And you know they’re different, because their workshops are ‘fun’.

Not bad for four words. Imagine if they’d had:

Hotel Carousel,The financial workshop

(Forgettable and does little to differentiate them from other trainers)

Now imagine:

Hotel Carousel,Training for our customers’ needs

(Hello-o! Just what kind of training are we talking about?)

It’s not good enough to just be clear. A good tagline must also be memorable. For example, you can look at some of other taglines we have come up with at Capstone:

Training & Performance Strategies,Turning an organization’s vision into results

The Continu Group,Managing risk, minimizing loss

Beyond Numbers,From analysis to action

Eiger Consortium,Turning challenges into opportunities

Valcoustics Canada Ltd.,Sound solutions to acoustical challenges

These taglines push the right buttons for their target markets.

So, how do you create an effective tagline?

You could sit down and try to sweat it out through brainstorming, playing with clever turns of phrase or bringing in the whole company to help. However, we’ve found a simple sequence helps the process move along more smoothly.

First you develop your positioning statement. Sometimes this is called your elevator speech or your fifteen-word commercial. This statement is much easier to come up with than a tagline, because it’s longer and encompasses all of the important information about your company.

Try to capture what your company is about in fifteen to twenty words. What is the position you claim in the market? What is it that you do? For whom you do it? What size companies make up your target market? (Or what disposable income bracket are your retail customers in?) What benefit do your clients derive from your product/service?

Maybe it’s easier if I use an example to show you what I mean. Capstone’s positioning statement is: “We help small and mid-size businesses get more business through innovative marketing materials, such as brochures, logos, websites and more”.

These twenty words capture our position in the market.

What do we do? We produce “innovative marketing materials, such as brochures, logos, websites and more”.

Who do we do it for? We work for “businesses”.

What size clients do we want? We want “small and mid-size businesses”.

What benefit do we bring our clients? They “get more business”.

Our positioning is not that tight or targeted. It’s much better if you can get a lot more focused than we are. :-)

Once you have developed your positioning statement, try removing all extraneous words then see what the result is. To continue using our own positioning statement as an example, we can easily pare it down to “We help small and mid-size businesses get more business through innovative marketing materials”

However, that’s still too long.

Now you have to decide which sections can go, and which sections are too important to prospects to let go of. With our own, we now get down to: “We help small and mid-size businesses get more business”.

It’s still too long. Remove even more, and you end up with: “We help businesses get more business”.

Much better. However, it still doesn’t “read” cleanly. Now it’s time to make it more active. So it becomes: “Helping businesses get more business”.

Five memorable words, that play to the prospect’s self-interest.

It starts by figuring out where you stand in the marketplace. Your position. Once you know where you stand, you can work your position down to a memorable identifier that will hold you in good stead for years to come.

When you take this approach to developing your tagline, you’ll produce a tagline that gets up every morning and works hard marketing your business.

Related Articles
  Strategic Tips To Help Clients & Customers Remember Your Brand
  Tagline, You're It
  10 Rules For Great Taglines
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  3 Mistakes Conscious Entrepreneurs Make When Launching a Product or Program

Article Tags: getting more business, marketing tool, phrase, serious business, slogan, tagline



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