As I was catching up on my business periodical reading over the long, lazy holiday weekend, I was struck by the number of bland, look-alike print advertisements in BusinessWeek, Fortune and the Wall Street Journal. As I perused the ads, I happened to glance at the tagline signatures below each marketer’s logo. They were so banal, so generic. It struck me that the taglines were not only pedestrian, they were also interchangeable. You could easily rip off one ad tagline, place it on another ad entirely and no one would be the wiser. To put this theory to the test, I’ll list the company and the wrong tagline. The first non-Peppercom person to correctly match the six companies and their taglines gets a handsome Peppercom baseball hat and pen (now, how’s that for value add in the blogosphere?). Here goes:
Toshiba: "A better world is our business"
Samsung: "Get more from life"
Toyota: "It’s about you by design."
Accenture: "Powering the predictable enterprise"
T-Mobile: "High performance. Delivered"
OutlookSoft: "Raising the bar"
Cingular: "Moving forward"
I’m amazed that companies pay ad agencies millions of dollars for this stuff. And, I could cite hundreds of examples of other boring, banal and totally meaningless words and phrases. Taglines are totally useless. In fact, why do they exist at all? Who invented them? As far as I’m concerned, some long-gone ad guy said, "Hey, maybe this could be a whole new, additional revenue stream for us. Let’s paste a tagline onto the creative stuff we show the client tomorrow and bill them extra." In an increasingly cluttered world on information overload, here’s one vote for taglines going the way of the Dodo bird. Who needs them? Oh, and if you have some particularly heinous advertising tagline(s) you’d like to share, please do so.
Actually, a tagline is an alternative of a branding slogan normally used in marketing materials as well as advertising. The design behind the theory is to generate an unforgettable phrase that will sum up the tone as well as premise of a brand or product (like a film), or to reinforce the audience’s memory of a product. Various taglines are winning enough to warrant inclusion in well-liked culture.
Samples of famous taglines are:
* Be afraid. Be very afraid. – The Fly
* In space no one can hear you scream. – Alien
* Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water… – Jaws
* A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… – Star Wars
* Love means never having to say you’re sorry – Love Story
* To boldly go where no man has gone before – Star Trek
* The truth is out there. – The X-Files
Very Good Blog and Very valued by CompanyLogos.ws
Here’s some fresh meat to chew on; eons.com just launched their web portal for boomers. The tagline is “50 plus everything…” It makes my brain freeze up.
So many taglines are so bogus. Remember Coke is it? They dropped that tagline once people woke up and realized the damage that sugar and empty calories could wreak on their bodies. Or, how about “Fly the friendly skies”? You won’t see United using that line any time soon. Not with their customer satisfaction and on-time arrival performancew at or near the bottom of the industry. Taglines are not only useless. But, as Richards has pointed out, they can actually be counter-productive as well.
Recently I attended a concert sponsored by Bass, whose logos and beer girls were found in every direction. On the wall I read “Reach for Greatness” and I almost choked on my Bass. Greatness?? Come on now, Bass is good, but certainly is not equivalent to greatness, and the phrase was so clearly conjured by an Ad company that it completely lost any possibility of appeal to me as a consumer. It only made me happy that I did not have to come up with a tagline for Bass.
Six? Seven? Math was never my strong suit. Pat yourself on the back, I-man. You got them all correct. I’ll throw in an extra Peppercom hat if you can explain the purpose of an advertising tagline. Actually, since they serve no discernible purpose, I’ll be interested in hearing your thoughts (since you’re such a big believer in advertising).
funny jimmy, b/c when you were at pcom, the interns used to say that you reminded them of an old AT&T slogan- “reach out and touch someone.”
When I think of Issac, this tagline comes to mind:
A mind is a terrible thing to waste. (United Negro College Fund)
I know, I know, it would be a perfect fit if only Isaac were a black guy. Oh well.
to be honest, i am not sure there is a real “purpose” in taglines. like you say, moving forward can be for a car company, the tram at newark airport or the nile river.
however, i knew 4 of the 7, the last 3 were a guess. so that means that they “meant something” to me. maybe the next time i hear someone say moving forward i will think of toyota..who knows. also, some are better than others, while some make no sense like the accenture one.
Six? Seven? Math was never my strong suit. Pat yourself on the back, I-man. You got them all correct. I’ll throw in an extra Peppercom hat if you can explain the purpose of an advertising tagline. Actually, since they serve no discernible purpose, I’ll be interested in hearing your thoughts (since you’re such a big believer in advertising).
rep- u said there were six, but i count seven.
here goes- the first 4 i am pretty sure of, the last 3 are a complete guess…
Cingular- raising the bar
t-mobile- get more from life
accenture- high perfor. delivered
toyota- moving forward
samsung- A better world is our business
outlooksoft- Powering the predictable enterprise
toshiba- its about you by design