James at Copyblogger has a great post on taglines.
Two points I especially love are
to keep it simple (“Be clear, not clever”)
and to pick a focus and stick with it.
The last is the most difficult.
According to T V Mohandas Pai,
chairman of Infosys BPO,
the latest generation of IT professionals “get easily bored.
They do just one project and
they get bored and
they want something else.”
This is not isolated to the IT field.
Taglines are part of branding
and the key to branding is consistency.
That means picking a tagline
and sticking with it.
He somewhat has a point. But his example of Nike “Just Do It” is ignoring the very real struggle that tagline had EVER making it to market. Nike HATED it! Consumer testing HATED it! The folks who wrote it couldn’t sell it in and it died on the page…except someone at Nike liked it and pushed it through the legions of marketing grads and consumer researchers…and after SEVERAL YEARS it gained traction. So – that example isn’t about the brilliance of a rock solid tagline…it’s a fluke it ever made it.
As for taglines being a part of branding, they are. But I would challenge that a majority of brands shouldn’t have a tagline because it actually narrows a brands reach to smaller targets UNLESS they are willing to go ‘big and somewhat vague” as with “Just Do It”.