Tag Lines Can Make Or Break Your Advertising
I remember several great advertising tag lines:
Don’t squeeze the Charmin !
Have a Coke and a smile !
We try harder.
Let your fingers do the walkin’.
I also have seen a million terrible ones, too. Just yesterday I looked over a piece of crappy copy that someone was thinking of using and the tagline on the top of the page was as poor a choice as could have been made.
That started my thinker and I tried to come up with an answer as to how and why the good ones come from. Pure luck is what I’ve decided.
Whatever you do, don’t force it. If you can’t come up with one, just run the ad and see if anybody suggests one after they see the campaign.
Most of the time the really good one’s are accidentally created anyway.
Good tag lines stand alone and make people think of your product.
Bad tag lines make people think your company is run by monkeys.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I think I’ve met some of those monkeys.
I KNOW I Have !
Thanks for stopping by Liz.
Developing a good tag line is much easier than luck.
Poor tag lines are developed in the boardroom, far away from a deep understanding of the customer.
Compelling tag lines - those that capture in just a few words what it is that makes customers perk up - are a natural result of developing a deep understanding of what is important to our target market.
Apparently FedEx’s super-successful “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight” was first uttered by a customer in a focus group - after watching a planned [and very average] TV commercial.
Bose uses “Better sound through research,” which says so much in so few words to their target market. Same for “Everything is easier on a Mac.”
In all three of these examples, the tagline is presented from the CUSTOMER’S point of view; articulating what the CUSTOMER values.
Lousy tag lines articulate what the company thinks about themselves and leave the customer thinking “Says who?”
Dov Gordon
Great addition to the post Dov.
Thanks for taking time to enlighten us with that.
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