Tagline Snapshot

Protecting & Promoting: Taglines are Advertising’s Poetry

Reinforcing brand personality and position

There are great taglines with simple, single meanings that are memorable (The Freshmaker – Mentos; Expect More, Pay Less – Target) but more often, really effective taglines have a double (A Diamond is Forever – DeBeers; Have a break…Have A Kit Kat – Kit Kat) or multiple (Just Do It – Nike) meanings.

We have always had a few rules when developing taglines for VFC client brands — one is to avoid the negative.

“You don’t want the target audience associating your offering with anything negative even if it’s juxtaposing your brand against a negative alternative,” we often caution.

The United Negro College Fund’s, The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste, is negative but it was named by Forbes Magazine as one of The 25 Best-Loved Advertising Taglines proving, yet again, that rules—especially rules about advertising— are made to be broken.

You will recognize many in the Forbes list but, I suspect, many are there because of the multi-million dollar campaigns that helped to ingrain them in the American cultural lexicon—not because they’re especially clever or even memorable. Where’s the beef?, however, becomes memorable with Pavlovian precision on the hundredth impression.

Think about McDonald’s and what a big deal it becomes when they change their tagline every few years. Remember when the fast food giant went from Have You Had Your Break Today? to Did Somebody Say McDonald’s? in the late 1990s?

It’s also interesting to note that they used a question as a tagline in successive campaign years. Perhaps posing the tagline as a question is a part of McDonald’s own specific criteria…

What determines success in a tagline?

Is it increased revenue? Enhanced market share? Owning a category?

Taglines, we contend, are unique animals in the marketing arsenal that can help with multiple marketing goals and evolve and grow with a brand. And, as we have seen with the case of McDonald’s, they’re the one branding component that can change completely without sacrificing awareness.

Sometimes brands launch a tagline with a real specific objective in mind.

Take Magic Marker’s tagline, for instance. The pen company wanted to use the tagline as a device to separate themselves from dozens of knock off brands when they used the slightly negative, If it doesn’t say Magic Marker, it isn’t.

The topic of the best taglines of all time recently came up in LinkedIn’s Advertising Professionals Group and, much like Forbes, posters focused on the best known rather than the best.

Unless it is determined that we should attempt to use tagline development to reach a very specific goal, which has been the case from time-to-time, VFC employs a hierarchy of criteria to develop the lowest common denominator of all possible phrases that still cleverly and creatively describes a product or a company.

Throughout our twenty one year history, VFC has started providing a creative brief with nearly every conceptual project that we present to a client– including taglines. With everyone from the local sign shop to commercial printers claiming to be creative content developers nowadays, it’s important for us to demonstrate our marketable difference at every opportunity.

VFC is focused on strategy

We don’t just build a website but we build a website that will achieve specific objectives and support a complete and custom campaign strategy. We bring big company thinking to small businesses and that includes the strategic development of brand taglines developed to meet very specific objectives.

We don’t just whip up some words and say, “here’s your new tagline,” like those newer competitors of ours might. Instead, we undertake actual competitive research, trend studies and market testing to present options within the VFC criteria that will perform for the brand.

In some cases we also named the company using the same strategy and criteria but here, in one place, are a few of Virtual Farm Creative’s more memorable taglines:

And, let’s not forget Virtual Farm Creative’s own tagline which was recently changed. For the first ten years we used, Where Ideas Grow! attempting to convey that we were pure creative strategy but recently we elected to try to be more descriptive and creatively focused on exactly what VFC does for our clients… Growing Brand BUZZ!