Simple marketing tag lines/headlines stay with us. The longer and more complicated the message, the more difficult it is to communicate. I believe the longer they are, the less effective.
Some examples:
- Got Milk?
- Just do it.
- The Real Thing.
- Where’s the Beef?
Of course each of these tag lines had massive multi million dollar campaigns hammering them home. But there is something about simplicity.
What about other great tag lines that really haven’t had a ton of media put behind them:
- When it rains, it pours.
- I can’t think of another… can you?? (no that’s not a tag line, that’s a question to you!!)
Looking for some inspiration in your tag line? Check out AdAge’s best 100 tag lines of all time.
This is the stage of writing the post where I go out and reference other posts who have written about tag lines. Only 2 minutes and 4 blogs later, I realize that taglines is ONE WORD. And, I amazed to find that Marketing guru Drew McClelland also wrote about taglines this morning…
- Two Types of Tagline: Great & “other” inspired by a British tag lines post by Kevin Horne Tag(line). You’re It.
It must be a tag line morning… I mean a tagline morning!
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Chris,
Thanks for the great article on taglines.
I’ve been around for a few years and I’ve seen/heard many of the ads mentioned in the adage link.
Just like I remember a lot of creative and clever commercials from my youth.
But,
remembering a creative commercial (somebody once suggested that commercials are the best part of TV) isn’t that same as that commercial being profitable.
Many of the companies whose commercials have won awards went out of business just the same.
The adage article rates those advertising campaigns based on their creativity and innovation, not on their ability to contribute to the company bottom line.
In the old days of advertising, there was no attempt to measure results.
Similarly, there are websites that attract lots of traffic, but the visitors are poor candidates for the product, or the website does a poor job of converting.
In the age of internet marketing (which is instant direct marketing) where we can test and measure like crazy, we need to be prepared to test everything!
I realize that getting the customers to think about a company in the right way is key to branding, but we have to look for ways to measure the direct benefit of that, and not assume, as marketers did for many year, that creativity in commercials equals money in the bank.
There are great software products available such as Muvar (http://www.muvar.com) that let us test every aspect of our online ads and pages, including the taglines that we use in the ads and body copy. Let’s be as creative as possible, but let’s commit to testing those creative headlines and taglines against a variety of alternatives, even longer ones.