KEY POINTS:
Here's a challenge. Walk up to your customer, any customer, and ask them to state your tagline without looking at your business card. Watch that customer's face.
First there's confusion. Then there's a desperate lunge at guesswork. And finally, they give up in mock terror.
You see what just happened? None of your customers, it seems, can remember your tagline.
And frankly, no one should, because the purpose of a tagline isn't necessarily memory-based.
The main purpose is to create curiosity. It's an attraction device. Nothing more. Nothing less.
The tagline is supposed to draw in the customer and get them to ask the question: "How do you do that?", or "What do you mean by that?"
Having tickled the customer's curiosity, the tagline should step back and let the rest of the marketing material do the talking.
Yet despite the apparent simplicity, trying to create a tagline will drive you loco for three reasons.
* Reason 1: Too many thoughts in one tagline.
* Reason 2: Lack of the combination of problem + solution + target audience.
* Reason 3: Not recognising that each product/service needs to have a tagline different from the company tagline.
Let's tackle reason one: too many thoughts in a tagline.
A tagline may have lots of thoughts running rampant through it. You need to be able to get the tagline down to a single thought.
For example: "Removing the roadblocks to high-end sales and creating loyal customers."
See that? Two thoughts there, removing roadblocks and creating loyal customers. Choose one, so the clarity comes through. If you drop one of the two thoughts, you get a thought that's crystal clear.
You get: "Removing the roadblocks to high-end sales".
Simple. Uncluttered. And gets the curiosity-meter beeping right away.
Which takes us to reason two: lack of the combination of problem + solution + target audience.
So what do the problem, solution and target audience have to do with taglines?
Let's analyse the previous tagline. Problem: blocks to high-end sales. Solution: removing the roadblocks. Target audience: not just any sales, but high-end sales.
And just for the heck of it, let's remove the elements, one by one, and see if it has the same impact.
When we remove the specific target audience, we get: "Removing the roadblocks to sales."
When we remove the problems, we get: "Helping you close high-end sales."
When we remove the solution, we get: (nope, you can't remove the solution without reducing the effectiveness).
The tagline, as you can see, is most effective when it has the combination of all three. Yes, it can run without the specificity of a target audience. And yes, we can drop "the problem" like a hot potato.
You can chop and change all you like, but, if it's extreme curiosity you want, keeping the trio of problem + solution + target makes sense.
But there's still one confusing factor.
It's reason three: not recognising that every product/service requires a different tagline from the company tagline.
Your company tagline may seem far-reaching.
After all, if you were to use the term "removing the roadblocks to high-end sales", you'd get more than your share of attention.
But even a great line like that wouldn't do squat if you were selling a slightly different product/service.
For example, if you offered a service that showed how to "make effective presentations to increase sales conversions", then your tagline has to reflect that specific audience - those interested in presentations.
And it must address the problem involved in making presentations: this problem could be fear.
When we add up the problem + solution + target and put in a dollop of the "individual product/service", we'd get something that looks like this: "Taking the fear out of sales presentations".
Now let's compare the two taglines side by side.
Tagline of company: "Removing the roadblocks to high-end sales." Tagline of specific service: "Taking the fear out of sales presentations".
Do you now see why each product, each service, needs to have a tagline that's related to that product/service alone?
The purpose of the tagline isn't some grandiose statement. It's not even a memory hook.
It's just a way to get momentum. Just the way to get the customer moving down to the main message.
So if your main message is detailing what your company excels at, then put that in the company tagline.
If you've got a product/service that even slightly deviates from the company message, as it will, then make the tagline specific to that product or service, and don't just slap on your company tagline everywhere.
So if you're making a presentation, a specific topic tagline is a great way to keep your audience pre-warmed.
If your tagline is on your web page, the tagline is just a precursor to the product/service that is to follow.
If you're about to make that elevator speech, your tagline gets the customer interested in a specific product/service before the elevator goes "ding".
Curiosity. That's all a tagline has to create. Nothing more. Nothing less.
* Sean D'Souza is chief executive of Psychotactics and is an international author and trainer.
www.psychotactics.com
