The Not-So-Fun Game of Tag(lines)
Ah, the “thrill” of developing the perfect tagline. People spend tons of effort, time (and often pay marketers tons of money) to come up with the perfect one. The one that says it all in a single line. The one that will make others just throw money at them. The one that will make them world famous forever and forever. Only to end up with something like, “Innovation Hub of the Americas” (state of Florida) or “Your potential. Our passion.” (Microsoft. As Maureen Rogers notes, if your/my/our potential were really their passion, they’d never have released PowerPoint.)
Now, I enjoy coming up with taglines, and they can really spice up your marketing, make ‘em look. But (shhh…here’s a marketing secret) - the best tagline in the world won’t really do much for your bottom line. Marketing words can never make up for mediocre products, bad service…and treating customers like money vending machines and employees like mindless cogs in those machines.
So, don’t pay a marketer to help you with taglines if:
1. Your customer service sucks. Spend it there. If you don’t know if it sucks - that’s a really good sign it probably does.
2. You keep losing good employees. Spend the money on them. (Costs far more to replace them, in real dollars and lost opportunities.)
3. You can’t seem to close a deal. Sales training anyone? Are the products even marketable? Are the prices reasonable? What’s your sales compensation plan?
4. You keep losing customers. (See #1 and #2.)
Read More: The always smart, always funny Maureen Rogers, Tagline, You’re It!
And, my oh-so-savvy fellow NM marketer, Mary Ellen Merrigan, Taglines: Brand Focus or Brand Distraction?
Related Posts:
Forget the Elevator Speech
Marketing Messages: “Well, Isn’t That Special!”
Marketing Messages: Barbarians At The Gate
Tags (heh): marketing, marketing troubleshooting, taglines
Photo Credit: CA, Flickr
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September 18th, 2007 at 6:58 am
Mary - You’ve hit the big, fat nail on the head when you write that “marketing words can never make up for a mediocre product,” etc. I’ve had clients say ‘if only we could get the word out…” when the word is really that they’ve got an undifferentiated, late to market, over-priced product. Unfortunately, some people think that marketing IS getting the tagline, or the word out, or going to a trade show, or giving out t-shirts. They don’t recognize that if they had marketing involved to begin with, they actually might have a differentiated product that is priced right. Grrrrrrr.
September 18th, 2007 at 7:03 am
Yep. I’m thinking of adding a new tagline to my biz card, “No, I won’t write your brochure.” Or, “Sorry, I’ll all out of fairy dust.”
That said, gotta go work on some “marketing stuff.”
September 18th, 2007 at 7:42 am
I honestly think that if a company is ready for a tagline, it should really write itself…by that point, you should have earned it!
Perhaps it’s the old elevator pitch boiled down to fine reduction…but if the company doesn’t know what it’s tagline should be, and needs to hire someone to come up with one, then they don’t deserve one.
A former employer once went from “The global leader in publishing solutions and service” to “All New Media” after paying a consultant. Nice, but we weren’t media, we were media software…and we had nothing new…
September 18th, 2007 at 9:54 am
Right on with this post Mary.
We use to joke at a previous place of employment that our tagline should be, “we don’t suck as much as we use to”.
Keep creating…anything but another brochure,
Mike
September 18th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Mike, And then there’s “We suck less than the other guys.”
When I worked at a big IT services company, my co-workers and I came up with, “Professional services delivered unprofessionally.” Cynical? who us? (This was the same company where, when the CEO decided we would -presto! - be “customer intimate” our oh-so-proper genteel PR Director came up with the idea of passing out condoms with our logo on them at trade shows. She was joking, she was joking, but still, you’d have to know her to truly appreciate this. We had a lot of fun with the whole “intimacy thing.”)
Mark, Hmmm….then maybe “same old mediocre stuff” (heh) That’ll be $10,000 please. Thank yew, thank yew very much.
September 26th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
I’ve just discovered your blog and love the comment about PowerPoint. This article is just for fun, but I think you will enjoy it:
http://www.slowdownnow.org/Main/American-Siesta.html