Consider What Differentiates You/Your Client: A good tagline communicates why a brand stands out from the competition. To come up with such a tagline, ask and answer questions like, “What sets us apart? What do we do better than our competitors? How are we uniquely positioned to serve our desired customers?” If you’re stumped, consider asking a few clients you are close with for feedback on why they like working with you. Your clients can do the same with their customers.

Demonstrate Value: An excellent tagline conveys a brand’s unique value proposition. It suggests how prospects lives will be improved by buying from/working with the brand. Walmart, for instance, has a tagline that achieves this. “Save Money. Live better.” This tagline relates Walmart’s main differentiator – the powerful benefit the retailer offers customers. To craft a strong tagline, ask questions like, “How do the services and solutions we provide make clients’ lives better?”

Be Brief: A tagline is not a mission statement or an “about us” paragraph on your website. It is a concise statement, phrase or question (Wendy’s: “Where’s the beef?”) that generates interest in your brand or your client’s brand among audiences you seek to influence.

While it’s essential to keep the tagline short, refrain from pressuring yourself into coming up with a pithy slogan right out of the gates. Instead, write down possible iterations of your tagline. They can be longer at first. As you go along, challenge yourself to pare down the words until you have something punchy. To help inspire brevity, think of taglines like Nissan’s “Innovation that excites” or Home Depot’s “More Saving. More Doing.”

Choose Your Words Wisely: Quality taglines avoid clichés and jargon, which can make a brand seem boring. Even in a jargon-thick industry like technology, the Apple tagline – “Think Different” – couldn’t be simpler or more effective in conveying what the innovator is all about.

While you want to avoid clichés, don’t strain to be so clever that you become vague, which will result in you failing to communicate anything relevant. Seek to use simple words to relate the essence of a brand – something like Ram Trucks’ “Guts. Glory. Ram.” Lastly, avoid using words or phrases that could be construed as offensive.

Case Study: Taglines Par Excellence

Leading promotional product distributors know how to craft a winning tagline. Many have done so for their own companies.

Take Jack Nadel International (asi/279600). The distributorship’s “Ideas Take Flight Here” suggests that the promotional marketing agency has the creative power and real-world expertise to help elevate clients’ success to new heights.

Then there is Tangerine Promotions (asi/341609). The company is keen to communicate that it isn’t an ordinary promotional products distributor – that its approach to branding is unique and imaginative, meticulous and customized so that each client will connect powerfully with its audience. There is, Tangerine seeks to convey, an art to crafting excellent promotions – an art that the company has mastered. Hence the tagline: “Tangerine: The Art of Promotions.”

5 iconic taglines

• Nike: Just Do It.
• BMW: The Ultimate Driving Machine.
• M&Ms: Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.
• U.S. Marines: The Few. The Proud. The Marines.
• Mastercard: There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s Mastercard.

Action Items

• Evaluate your business tagline to see if it creates the impression you want to make.
• If your tagline falls short,  spend time using the article’s tips to create a potent one.

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