With some taglines, you only have to see or hear them to instantly recall the brand that conceived it. For example, you probably don’t need us to spell out which companies coined the slogans “Just do it”, “I’m lovin’ it” and “Exceedingly good cakes”, such is the power of the well-crafted tagline.

However, slogans like these aren’t just for big-name companies. Smaller brands can urgently need taglines for succinctly and memorably summarising their mission, as Forbes points out. This gets to the heart of why even just one tagline can work well across multiple marketing platforms…

What core purpose should your tagline serve?

Today, even if you run a small company with scarce economic resources, you still have a wide range of good-value marketing means at your ready disposal. For example, any business can, for free, register accounts on various social media sites and start posting to these accounts regularly.

However, as many of the world’s best-known taglines significantly predated the social media age, it’s clear that the likes of Facebook and Twitter haven’t spurred the proliferation of taglines. In essence and any age, a tagline should take no more than a few words to encapsulate your brand’s nature.  

That doesn’t give you a huge amount of leeway for creating something memorable – and, indeed, it’s no wonder that taglines can too easily slide into trite or unpredictable territory. Just think of KFC’s “So Good” slogan, which has been derided as “hollow-sounding”, as Inc. makes clear.

What works in a tagline and what doesn’t?

Such is the variety of taglines that it can be difficult to tease out definite dos and don’ts when it comes to creating one. However, we can probably all recall various examples of slogans which have long endured in the memory, perhaps even after the brands in question have stopped using them.

Many such taglines have been highlighted by Econsultancy, with HSBC’s “The world’s local bank” showing the financial services institution’s down-to-earth approach despite its clearly multinational reach. Similarly, Tesco’s “Every little helps” reaffirms the retail giant’s ultimate focus on the customer – though, of course, value for money comes into the equation here, too.

What, then, should you actually avoid doing? In general, puns don’t tend to work well, at least if they aren’t genuinely clever, though the “Shave time, shave money” slogan used by Dollar Shave Club does faithfully reflect the company’s witty and self-deprecating approach to advertising.

How could you find a tagline for your company?

The fact that certain slogans have stood the test of time for decades shows that the essentials of a good tagline remain much as they were generations ago. Nonetheless, in 2019, you could focus on coming up with a tagline easy to imagine looking good not just on print materials but also on digital platforms including websites, social media and apps.

Hence, you could benefit from tasking copywriters with coining your tagline in tandem with other digital marketing services helping you to spread the word far and wide online.