How to Create an Unforgettable Tagline for your Brand?

Image © Gavin Topp

A tagline is a small amount of text used in business marketing materials and advertising whose aim is to clarify and summarize an intended thought or dramatic effect. Most of them reiterate phrases associated with individuals, products or social groups that may have been presented in form of literature or audio – visual. Their intention is to make the message unforgettable in the minds of an audience.

Importance of a Tagline in Branding

The brand tagline of your business is an essential component of its branding strategy. It comes second after the business logo in terms of what will appeal to your clientele and inform them about what your business is all about. In essence, a brand tagline carries your business identity as well as what products or services you offer.

To prosper in the world of business with its cut-throat competition, you must appreciate that people are more likely to do business with personalities they can identify with and share their values. Your tagline will therefore come in handy in revealing who you are and what you stand for.

Taglines establish a customer’s trust in your products or services and your ability to deliver whatever you have promised. Care therefore has to be taken to make sure that you hold up your end of the bargain in as far as the promises you make in your tagline are concerned.

The tagline also presents an opportunity for your business to unravel what sets it apart from the rest of the pack. What gives you an edge over your competitors? A good example is the Beats by Dre headphones’ tagline, “Heat what You Want”. It clearly paints the picture that you should choose these particular headphones in order to get a new personal experience with your music.

So, how to create an unforgettable tagline?

The survivors in today’s business are those who do the little things to gain competitive advantage. The importance of a brand tagline cannot be over-emphasized and as such, businesses must make sure that they get it right. Merely throwing together a bunch of rhymes or puns may therefore fail to do the trick. The message carried by your tagline must be in such a way as to speak to the product as well as establish a brand philosophy.

To this end, make sure that the tagline you come up with for your business is short and catchy. Something like BMW’s “The ultimate driving machine”, Apple's "Think different" and Nike's "Just do it", captures the brand essence and positioning, commands action and succeeds in immediately conveying the right message to the customers.  The free lesson here for both small and large business owners is that a good tagline will help you get ahead of the rest.

When coming up with your tagline, ensure you maintain focus on selling the benefits of what you have to offer and an essence of the brand. In short, the end user must not escape your mind at any one time. Tell them what it is that you offer that they want. Also, an unforgettable tagline has to carry your personality, business values and be a reflection of your brand. This has to be done using the most direct and concise words possible that evoke and inspire your purpose. In this way a tagline then functions to save you a lot of expenditure on any advertising you would have to do to promote and strategically position your brand.

Additionally, it is important that you test your tagline before you put it out there. Run it by your customers, employees or even family first to make sure that you come up with the right one. Since not all of us are word smiths, don’t shy away from asking for help or launching a contest to come up with the best.

It is also note-worthy that in an effort to achieve more objectives in a tagline, you may end up with a generic tagline that fails to realize the desired effect, which is to strengthen and reinforce the crux of your brand and product. You must therefore ensure that you keep it simple and short (less than ten words to be on the safe side) yet unforgettable. “Magically Delicious” by Lucky Charms is an example of the use of taglines that have been so successful as to form part of pop culture.

In recent times, with the increase of videos and blog posts as mediums of marketing, the temptation to consider the written word as irrelevant and out of place is quite real. However, any business nursing ambitions of being a mover and shaker in their industry must appreciate that the written word has the rare ability to transcend across all marketing mediums and disciplines. This speaks to the importance of a good and well-crafted tagline.

The primary role of content marketing, according to Forbes Magazine, is to introduce and explore the philosophy and values of a brand. Choose a good tagline and make your business prosper.