12 November 2009

Five Tips For Creating a Tagline That Your Client Will Fall in Love With

There are plenty of tips for creating a tagline your client will fall in love with. These are on the top of my list.

Simplicity
Though it lacks soul, salesforce.com's "No Software" icon is an effective tagline. This is an idea simple enough for anyone to understand. salesforce.com has not only built a brand around this simple tagline, they started a category, SAAS. Simplicity sells.

Clarity
The tagline tagline process forces you to be clear. If you're like most companies, you have a number of things you'd like customers to know about you. You need to decide which is first among equals, or don't bother with a tagline. If you are better, faster and stronger, decide which attribute is least prevalent among your competitors and emphasize that.

Branded
If you've conducted a brand exercise, then a tagline should flow naturally from that. A tagline is a distillation of your brand into its simplest, most memorable form. Our recent brand work for Unica corporation is a strong example of a branded tagline. We built a customer-focused brand around the tagline, "Marketing Success Starts with U," which employs the double meaning,

a) - that "U," the customer are ultimately in control of your marketing and

b) - that the "U" also stands for Unica, the catalyst for that success.

Unique
Volkswagen's "Drivers Wanted" is one of my favorite taglines. In just two words (yes, forget for a moment the multi-million dollar ad campaign) it implied the kind of customer they were targeting and made one want to be that customer. Two little words uniquely raised the perception of quality and brand leadership. "Drivers Wanted" actually embodies all of the characteristics of a great tagline.

Benefit-driven
A good tagline is benefit-driven. The work we did for medical device maker NxStage Medical, is a good example of a benefit-driven tagline. NxStage is revolutionizing kidney dialysis (renal care) by providing a simple, compact home dialysis solution. Our tagline is "Renal Care, Pure and Simple." This understated tagline actually embodies a revolutionary concept for this market, which is "simplicity," and combines it with a requirement of dialysis, which is purification of blood.

These 5 tips will give you a great start for crafting a tagline your clients will fall in love with... or at least begin to develop a romantic inclination.

Photo courtesy of House of Sims

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Posted by Paul Regensburg at 11:13 AM