The Tagline: A good one is worth its weight in gold. A bad one is often painfully obvious.
Forbes recently published a compendium of “the best-loved advertising taglines” as judged by a panel of preeminent marketing and advertising experts – with BMW’s “The Ultimate Driving Machine” winning top honors. Click here to see a slideshow of the winners.
Taglines are deceptively simple, as the Forbes list confirms – “Just Do It” and “Think Different” are just a couple of words but convey so much about their respective brands.
When we come up with a tagline for a client, it often is after hours of internal brainstorming meetings, complete with lots of wall-sized Post-It papers scribbled with all kinds of words, phrases and ideas. (Not to mention chocolates and coffee).
Often what a company lands on for their “tagline” is a few steps away from a finished, polished product. We often land on what we think is a solid idea and leave it hanging in our staff break area for a few days so we can all “live” with it for a while.
Then we gather around a table again to make sure it still fits with what we’re trying to accomplish. Many times, what we thought was a final tagline is actually just the first really good idea, and we tweak it more until we all have the “that’s it!” moment.
Sometimes, though, a tagline just comes in the middle of the night, or while you’re having a post-lunch cup of coffee – the “a ha!” moment is unpredictable.
Creativity, conciseness and memorability are all key when coming up with a tagline – don’t shortchange your process when you take on creating one.
Cindy Harris
