The End of the Line for the Tagline

Here’s a fun thing to kill some time at work: cut and paste a bunch of your competitors’ logos into a slide or a document. Now, take your company tagline and superimpose it under or beside your competitor’s logo. Does it work for them? If they put your tagline on their brand, would anyone even notice? No? Congratulations, you have a crappy tagline.

You can take comfort in the knowledge that most taglines are crappy distillations of soul-destroying group-think-addled committees who have journeyed so far up the arse of your brand that almost any combination of a transitive verb, a biz-speak noun and an evocative adjective seems like the dawn of a new era in human achievement.

Before you start inundating me with Nike and Volvo and other examples of good taglines, I will concede that every so often, the committee or the agency gets it right.

Dunkin’ Donuts, for example, has used “America runs on Dunkin’ Donuts” for years, and with good reason. One of my all-time favourites, spotted on a Swan Dust Control truck is this: “We take the dirt away”, it’s not be unique, but it’s blazingly descriptive.

I always kind of liked Taco Bell’s long-gone “Make a run for the border” tag. It sort of worked, though I expect you’d be disappointed if you were thinking of the Canadian border. Dairy Queen’s “Hot eats, cool treats” stakes out some good territory and Disneyland should be justifiably proud of “The happiest place on earth”.

But I suggest that taglines that work and actually add value are exceedingly rare and co-exist in the world with stuff like this:

does anyone else find this tag a little gross?

I’m going to suggest this one has run its course

Not going there. But you see my point.

Plus the hundreds of companies using some variation on

“Our product is your satisfaction”

B2B brands give us such gems as:

These probably seemed like pure genius to those poor committees, or perhaps they were just the weary compromise at the end of the bun fight. Either way, they aren’t adding value, they probably haven’t done a thing for brand equity and they’ll need to be replaced in two years when there’s enough budget to try it again.. Here’s what I think we need to replace our crappy taglines with: Nothing

That’s right. Absolutely nothing. B2B brands (and most B2C ones as well) really don’t need taglines, so I would suggest that unless you have one that is beyond brilliant, you should move along and work on something more interesting.

Great B2B brands that have figured this out include Deloitte. Pitney Bowes, EMC, PWC, Gartner, SAP, Juniper Networks, Oracle and Xerox. On the B2C side, Apple, Aviva, Microsoft and PayPal are also getting along just fine without a tagline.

It’s important not to confuse taglines with slogans.  A slogan is the battlecry  brands use in campaigns, and there is a lot more latitude in what you can get away with. Slogans support campaigns, and campaigns make money, which is why they get to be cute, evocative, funny, moving, different and action-oriented. Slogans also have a shelf life, or ought to.

Taglines are none of those things; they are intended to be a semi-permanent adjunct to a wordmark or logo, but most of them live out their days as embarrassed collections of words lurking about on stationery and webpages adding nothing.

I say it’s time we turfed them out for good.

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Why Meaning Matters More Than Noise

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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