Follow. Forget. Fail. Why 3 Word Taglines Suck
08. Oct, 2009 
14 Comments
I am all for simplicity in marketing messaging. Attention just might be the world’s scarcest commodity and bloated, complicated marketing messages lose the attention game to clear, simple messages every time. However, as much as I’m a big fan of simple messages, occasionally I think people take it so far that the end result is just as meaningless as pages and pages of technical specifications.
What’s up with all the 3 word taglines? People are in love with these! And when I say “people” I mean folks that aren’t in marketing. The impression I get is that these folks think that a tagline can be a substitution for a proper value proposition or well-formulated messaging. It isn’t. In fact you have to work through creating a value proposition and messaging first before you could possibly make a tagline that works. Once you have clearly defined who your target market is, what value you
bring to that market and how you differentiate from alternatives, then
you can go about the hard work of distilling that down into a set of
messages. From those messages you might decide to have a tagline that
is a short, memorable slogan that describes what you do.
If you decide you absolutely need to have a tagline, here are some things to consider:
- Relevant for Your Customers – think about who it’s for and make sure that your message is relevant for them.
- Differentiated – Many taglines will pass the test of being relevant for their customer base but are so un-differentiated that they could apply to any competitor. Words like innovation, collaborate, superior, advanced, etc., may well describe what your product/company does but your competitors can probably claim to be just as innovative or advanced as you are.
- Memorable – This is where the magic happens in taglines. The whole point of a tagline is that you want people to remember it. If you can create something that is relevant for your customers, highlights how you are distinct from your competitors AND does that in a memorable way, you’ve got a winner.
A bit of surfing around got me this list of crummy taglines. These taglines could be applied to just about any product or company I have ever worked at:
- Transform your Business
- Tomorrows Solutions Today
- Discover, Interact, Optimize
- Ensuring Customer Success
- Grow Your Business
- Forward Faster
- Superior by Design
Do some hard thinking about your messaging before you attempt to create a tagline. Or better yet – if it isn’t adding anything to your
messaging, how about leaving it out altogether? White space is your
friend! Embrace it and stop clogging up your messaging
with a bunch of empty, meaningless, forgettable (superior, advanced, innovative) taglines.
Subscribe to this blog or follow me on Twitter or Friendfeed
Related posts:
Blog post: Follow Forget Fail: Why 3 word taglines suck. http://bit.ly/1MFJqS
I’m in marketing and I agree with you that non-marketers tend to think that having a tagline is really important when normally I agree that you could get away without one. I prefer a single line descriptive sentence over a tagline.
John
Great post. Good to the last drop.
Seriously, I have done a lot of work in high tech and I have seen some awful high tech company tag lines because the companies “thought” they had to do it. The infamous “Success, not Software” comes to mind. It is the responsibility of Marketing to make sure the message works or have the guts not to do it. I’ve had the good fortune to work with some amazing Insurance companies that get the use of a tag lines to enhance their brand and extend their value proposition. If you’re out there testing a tag line, I’d ask myself if the one being considered is as good as what they have done or at least approaches it. Use them as a model. You’re in good hands.
Hi John,
Thanks for the comment. I’m a big fan of using a full statement over a tagline. I know it won’t work if you are trying to incorporate it into a logo but if you are using it on your marketing materials, on your website, etc. you usually have enough space to use plain english.
April
Hi Rob,
Thanks for the comment. I actually kind of liked “Success, not Software” back when Salesforce.com was the only real SaaS CRM offering out there. It’s less differentiated now for sure but the fact that they are a hosted service and not an installed software solution still key part of their value prop.
You bring up a good point with Allstate (and Maxwell House for that matter) in that if your tagline is memorable and you stick with it long enough and your brand is big enough, it takes on a life of its own. This is part of the reason people think it’s so critical to have a tagline in the first place. What smaller companies don’t realize is how long and expensive it is to get a tagline to stick like “You’re in Good Hands”.
April
But three-word taglines work perfect with what our mearking head used to call “donut charts.” You know the ones – a ring divided into three (maybe 4) segments with arrows at the end of each? Because you cannot have an Enterprise product without a donut chart somewhere. [Ethan]
Meaning-less Taglines that Suck #Marketing #RockectWatcher http://bit.ly/48GFKE