Small Business Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Conveying Your Position and Brand through Taglines

Your tagline or slogan is a quick, memorable phrase that helps consumers link your name to your business brand and position. Your positioning statement tells the unique market niche and mind space you aim to occupy. Your tagline converts that statement to a line that matters to consumers.

You need a tagline if your brand name benefits from some explanation. For instance, Jiffy Lube doesn’t need a tagline but BMW does, because if you’d never heard of BMW, its name alone wouldn’t tell you what it is and does.

For some tagline inspiration, go to www.adslogans.co.uk/hof for a list of famous taglines compiled by the Advertising Slogan Hall of Fame.

As you develop a tagline for your brand, follow some advice from Eric Swartz, who calls himself a verbal branding professional and master wordslinger, and who lives up to his self-description on both counts. He’s created thousands of brand expressions, including corporate taglines, city mottoes, campaign slogans, company and product names, headlines, and other short-form messages.

His business, TagLine Guru (www.taglineguru.com ), is summed up by the tagline, “It’s your brand on the line.” Here’s what he says you need to know as you write a tagline for your brand:

A tagline should say something ...