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Taglines and slogans that work

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 2, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Strategy | 0 comments

Taglines and slogans can either give immediate clarity or total obscurity in just a few breaths. If you’re struggling to gain mindshare with prospective customers, something as simple as a slogan that actually makes sense can work wonders.

What should a good slogan do?

It should immediately and unequivocally convey what unique value you provide. The US Army, for the longest time, said “Be all that you can be”. That communicates their unique value to you fairly obviously. Marketers and salespeople have long been told to be able to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?”, but there’s a second question you need to be able to answer just as fluently: “What’s different about you?”.

Here’s a few taglines that you may remember:

The breakfast of champions.
When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.
Save money, live better.

A good slogan, a good tagline becomes so memorable that it becomes its own brand after a while. If you recognize any of these, then they and their associated products or services succeeded. They convey value and they convey uniqueness. They answer what’s in it for me and they also answer what’s different about you.

By contrast, here are three mobile companies’ slogans. What kind of services do they provide, and what’s in it for you?

Stick together.
Rule the air.
Beyond talk.

Here’s a few from other consumer-facing companies that are even worse:

You got people.
Live your life.
Look again.

If you’re looking to make your brand, product, or service stand out, slogans like this won’t do it for you. Without the company names, there’s absolutely no indication whatsoever about who the company is, what they do, how they can help you, or why they’re different.

If you’re struggling with a slogan, consider the tale of the grandma. There’s an old storyteller’s parable that says the more specific you are about your own grandmother, the more other people will relate to you with specifics of their own. If you talk about grandma’s cookies, you’ll get a response out of some people, but if you talk about how grandma’s cookies always seemed to have just a touch of extra ginger in them, other people will enthusiastically relate that their grandma put in nutmeg or cinnamon, etc. Specificity is okay as long as you convey benefit with it.

Let’s tackle one more real life example. If we apply the label scrape test to my friend DJ Waldow’s company tagline, it doesn’t do so well:

Waldow Social helps businesses leverage the power of events, email and social media marketing to help grow their community and turn prospects into fans, evangelists and clients.

Unfortunately, that description fits a ton of companies. It’s too generic. Knowing DJ and having worked with him and his unique abilities to build a strong, vibrant community, he’d be better served with a tagline like this:

Waldow Social grows your lukewarm audience into raving lunatic fans and profitable business with proven event, email, and social strategies.

As an extra bonus, it fits inside 140 characters, plus it differentiates what DJ can bring to the table from other boring marketing companies peddling Facebook 101 garbage. It also fits his personal brand and personality, which goes something like this:

Your slogan or tagline can be the conversation starter that opens doors or the mindless drivel that slams them shut in your face. What’s in it for me, what’s different about you?

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10 ideas for your monthly reboot

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 1, 2011 in Awakening, Productivity | 5 comments

Every month, I typically start with a few tweets to friends and followers asking if you’ve cleaned out your inbox. Generally, I like to say that if you haven’t read mail from the first of the previous month, just archive it now since you’re not getting to it. However, my monthly maintenance routine is slightly more detailed than that. Here’s what I do around the first of each month; perhaps you have a routine that helps to boost your productivity, too.

1. Archiving old mail. I follow my own advice here and archive everything I know I’m not getting to.

2. Mark all as read. Once I’ve done my morning reading (I typically read for about 90 minutes every morning), I’ll flush out everything and hit Mark all as read in my blog readers. Stuff that’s older and laying around rapidly loses its value anyway.

3. Delete old syndications. I’m subscribed to a lot of podcasts and other digital downloads. I flush out the old ones each month, whether or not I’ve read/watched/listened.

4. Remove barely used or unused apps. This is something relatively new. I go through my apps on my iPad and pull ones that I downloaded that looked cool or something. If I really want them, I can always grab them out of the cloud again, but I do place a premium on a relatively uncrowded iPad.

5. Organize my hard drive. Each month, cruft accumulates, from PDFs and text files to data dumps to office memos. This both slows down my machine and slows down my brain, so I get stuff into folders and get the desktop clear.

6. FULL BACKUP. No excuses. I have a small portable 1 TB hard drive that I do all my backups on. Backups are one of those things you just leave overnight and the next day, you’re done.

7. Full hard drive defrag. I find this really speeds things up for me on my Mac.

8. On the topic of blogs, I remove any that I haven’t read that month and search out five new blogs to subscribe to every month. This is absolutely essential, because if you just keep reading the same stuff over and over again, you stagnate.

9. Review and purge my to do list. Stuff always accumulates in there that I know I’m not going to do. Every month, a good bunch of it heads for the digital dumpster.

10. Desk clearing. Those few folks who have been to my physical office space in metrowest Boston know that it’s not a large office. To the extent that I can throw away anything non-essential, I do.

Those are my 10 things that I do at the start of each month in order to create conditions conducive to productivity. What do you do as part of your regular monthly reboot routine?