Taglines and platitudes

Taglines, slogans, positioning statements, or whatever you want to call them, are usually five-to-eight-word phrases that are supposed to differentiate your business, product, service or event from your competition.

Y2K Marketing, a network of no-nonsense marketing consultants founded by Richard Harshaw and Edward Earle, have a great way to evaluate taglines.

After hearing or reading a tagline for the first time, if your reaction is "Well, I should hope so!", you're hearing or seeing a platitude, not an effective tagline.

I mentioned a moving company in a recent blog with whose tagline is "the caring moving company". Isn't your reaction to that line, "well, I should hope so!"? That's a platitude.

Effective taglines are difficult to craft. That's why so many turned out by wordsmiths sound good but mean nothing.

But taglines can be evocative, define a context, or express an idea if it's based on the central core of your organization. There's where you should start. Once you've captured the essence of your organization in a tagline, subject it to the "well, I should hope so" test.

If you discover your best efforts result in a platitude, I suggest you look to your business core. Perhaps it needs to be rethought and revamped to reflect a truly differentiated offering.

Martin Jelsema
Signature Strategies
Helping smaller businesses profit from the power of branding

www.signaturestrategies.biz