A peer of mine, Matthew Fenton wrote a great blog on developing or using a tagline. This is very applicable to all businesses, but can be confusing for the independent physician or healthcare provider.
I hope you’ll find it enlightening and leave me comments with your thoughts or challenges.
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Five Tips for Successful Brand Taglines
If you’ve ever dealt with matters of brand identity, you’ve probably wrestled with the tagline questions: Do we need one at all? How do we get to the right one? What should a tagline be, say and do?
1. You might not need a tagline.
Professional copywriters, before you inundate me with hate mail, hear me out. Many of the world’s top brands don’t have a tagline. It’s a situational choice, and we’ll discuss those situational considerations next. But brand leaders, don’t buy the line that “having a tagline can’t hurt.” Sure it can. If it’s the wrong tagline, it undermines the overall brand. And developing the right tagline has attendant costs: The time to generate, evaluate and approve them; the money to hire a professional copywriter, which I absolutely recommend; and the attention to manage the process well. While you are deploying those resources, the market is not waiting to buy.
Your mindset should be, “We need a tagline only if we are very confident that it will strengthen our brand and outweigh its costs.” Actually, that should be your mindset for all kinds of brand decisions.
2. A tagline is part of a system.
More specifically, a tagline is part of two systems:
Your verbal identity system. These are all the words your brand uses to present itself to the market. These can include, but are not limited to, campaign themes, key messaging, web copy, sales collateral copy and packaging copy.
Your overall marketing system. These are all the tools and tactics that form your go-to-market strategy.
Ask: In what environments will the tagline reside, and how will it be deployed?
For instance, if you’re a local retailer or services firm that primarily invests in billboard advertising – where the use of words should be economic – your campaign messages are probably more important than a new tagline.
Most of us know Geico’s tagline: “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance.” It’s not particularly catchy – and we’ll talk about that too – but it registers because it’s been deployed effectively. I don’t like everything about Geico’s ads, but they’ve been consistent and focused in this regard. They’re also spending nearly a billion dollars a year, which helps.
You don’t have a billion-dollar ad budget. So consider how your tagline will actually see the light of day. Taglines live or die on consistency and repetition. If your marketing plan is unlikely to generate numerous near-term impressions of the tagline with your target audience, you can probably do without.
3. A tagline conveys one idea well.
Consider a few of my all-time favorite (and very successful) taglines:
“We try harder.” – Avis 
“You are now free to move about the country.” – Southwest Airlines
“When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” – FedEx
Each is very different in tone and message. But they each work because they convey a key aspect of the core brand idea – which is to say they work in concert with everything else the brand is about. And they met strategic objectives for each brand at the time of their use.
Your tagline should effectively convey a single important idea. What are some rich veins of exploration for these ideas? I submit the following five:
Target – Who you serve
Benefit(s) – What they get
Point(s) of Difference – Why you’re different
Character – Your brand personality
The Brand Experience – How your brand is lived
On this note, I can’t stress strongly enough: Fear the committee. When taglines are on the table, everyone from the mailroom to the boardroom has an opinion to share. And the boardroom in particular has a tendency to shoehorn nine ideas into a single tagline. So make it clear at the outset of the project that, as the brand leader, you’ll welcome opinions, but the final call is yours.
You must be choosy. A tagline can’t do everything. At best, it can convey a single idea well. On that note…
4. The right tagline is worth paying for.
Successful copywriting is a skill and an art. Great copywriters traffic in clarity, economy, rhythm, metaphor, and a host of other tools at which they are adept. Most of use mere mortals are not so adept. I write all my own blog posts, and I feel comfortable with my skills in this environment. But I’m a strategist, not a copywriter. If I decided that my company, Three Deuce Branding, needed a tagline, I would immediately turn to a copywriter I trust, and would compensate him or her fairly to get to the right result.
I’ve had the most success asking a copywriter to brainstorm a list of taglines within a few specific areas of exploration: “Here are three ideas we’d like to explore. Drill deep on these.”
Once you get the results back, you have tangible ideas that can be compared and played off each other. Don’t go for the catchiest – go for the most effective. Get the idea right, then worry about the wordsmithing. And expect a few rounds of revisions – even a strong copywriter is unlikely to nail it in the first round, and will benefit from fair and thoughtful feedback.
One of my clients recently adopted a new tagline. To get there, we looked first at the overall marketing system. Their tools tilted toward web and sales collateral, which were heavily focused on credibility and proof points, so we saw an opportunity for the tagline to convey our higher-order brand aspirations. We were able to direct a professional copywriter to go deep in that area alone, which streamlined the process and got to the right answer, while saving time and money.
5. A good tagline meets certain criteria.
Use the following three criteria:
Ours Alone – Within your competitive set, a successful tagline only applies to you, and truthfully reflects a core aspect of your brand.
One Thing – You have one last chance to check for committee-creep, and this is it. Given an extremely limited number of words, it’s crucial to do one thing well, not two things half-assed.
Operates Effectively – A successful tagline will fit with and elevate your verbal identity system. Be clear, not clever. Say something meaningful and important, and say it well.
A few additional reminders:
Simplicity is table-stakes. I’m assuming here that any tagline under consideration is crisp, simple and short. Nine words is your maximum. If your copywriter isn’t delivering this as a baseline, fire him.
But, Matthew, what about being memorable?
Would I rather have a lively expression of an idea vs. a dull one? Sure. But that alone won’t make your tagline instantly memorable. The tagline’s consistent use in your overall branding system is what will make it memorable. Truth is memorable; B.S. is not. Focus is memorable; “cleverness for the sake of cleverness” is not. Consistency is memorable; erraticism is not.
