A great tagline can inspire, persuade and promote. There’s a certain ephemeral magic to lines like ‘Just Do It’ (Nike), ‘Think Differently’ (Apple) and ‘The Best a Man Can Get’ (Gillette). But how do you write one of your own?

What is your core value?

Each of the above examples manages to distil an entire company’s philosophy into one sentence, without expressly stating it. They create an implicit understanding of what the company is about in a more meaningful way than a lengthy corporate mission statement ever could.

Ask yourself, what is your company’s core value? What do you do? What is it that you do that no one else does? Think of Wikipedia’s tagline: ‘The Free Encyclopaedia’. Perfect.

Who are your customers?

Taglines aren’t simply functional, the best create an emotional resonance with their target market, inspiring an allegiance to an abstract brand. The genius behind ‘Just Do It’ and ‘Think Differently’ is that they both suggest a certain type of person and associate it with the brand.

It’s like saying ‘If you buy Nike, you are a proactive go-getter’ or ‘Buying Apple makes you an independent thinker’. Both these messages are very attuned to the life goals of Nike and Apple’s target markets, but they’ve managed to pack them into two very short sentences.

Who are your customers? What do they want out of life?

Just write it

Of course, this sort of writing is exactly the sort of thing that can happen by accident. If you over think it, you might well end up with something stilted that says everything you want it to, but that isn’t pithy, catchy or memorable in the slightest.

Having established what you want it to encapsulate i.e. your core message/values and the core values of your target market, it really is a case of just sitting down and writing. Try anything and everything. It’s highly unlikely that ‘Got milk?’ was the result of a flowchart; inspiration plays a huge part in this.

Don’t be too literal. Taglines are like the poetry of sales copy. The meaning doesn’t have to be explicit. Like the Nike and Apple examples, it can be completely implicit and yet well understood. In fact, the less explicit it is, the more likely it is to have an emotional resonance.

And finally

• Be honest
• Keep it short
• Use simple language
• Emphasise benefits: what you do, not how you do it

How did you come up with your company tagline? Do you feel it’s necessary to have one at all?

Image Credit: SharonaGott

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2011 at 7:25 am and is filed under Copywriting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.