A tagline tells the world who you are. Often paired with your logo, a great tagline communicates what your logo doesn’t and helps new audiences understand what you offer.
Here are a few examples of taglines that have achieved strong consumer recognition in Australia.
Shorter (2-3 words):
- Nike. Just do it.
- NAB. More than money.
- Apple. Think different.
- McDonald’s. I’m lovin’ it.
- Subway. Eat fresh.
Longer (4+ words):
- Woolworths. The fresh food people.
- Mastercard. There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s Mastercard.
- Canva. Design anything. Publish anywhere.
- Maybelline. Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.
As these examples show, a strong tagline quickly articulates what you offer your target audience – whether that’s tech products, fresh (or fast) food or a home loan.
So, how can you create a powerful tagline for your business or brand? Content Empire has a strong record of creating successful taglines for clients. Keep reading for our top tips.
Focus on your audience
An effective tagline will attract, inspire and make sense to your priority target audience(s) – most importantly, your current and prospective clients and customers. Taglines also need to resonate with internal stakeholders such as staff and board members. To understand your audience, collect and review every audience insight you can lay your hands on, from consumer behaviour data to social insights and survey results. Avoid the temptation to fall back on old assumptions about your clients and customers – interrogate your audience insights and allow them to inform the tagline ideation process.
Keep the tagline simple and short
This can be a real challenge, particularly for internal stakeholders who are very close to a company’s products, services and activities. A fresh perspective from an external team (like Content Empire!) can help distill longer sentences into punchy, memorable taglines.
Make the tagline distinctive yet authentic
It’s easy to fall back on the same words that are used by your competitors. Workshop new language and word choices. Using word clouds to map positive customer feedback can be one way to identify new words to authentically describe your products or services.
Consider its application
A great tagline needs to work well with your logo and in creative campaign assets across numerous platforms and channels. It also needs to flow through to your key messaging.
Follow a tagline development process
Content Empire has worked with several clients to ideate and develop memorable taglines. With a powerful tagline in place, we have then helped build campaigns to both launch and grow businesses. Here are some insights about the process we follow to develop successful taglines.
For Melbourne boys’ school, Brighton Grammar School, we created Be Part of It. Created in 2019, Be Part of It continues to be used by the school thanks to its strong resonance with current and prospective BGS audiences. A ‘deep dive’ discovery process plus effective analysis of audience insights was vital to the creative process. We presented and workshopped several options with Brighton Grammar stakeholders, before moving forward with Be Part of It.
We also created Belong at Billanook for Billanook College. This tagline articulates Billanook’s educational points of difference and unique sense of community. Extensive brand benchmarking and audience surveys helped inform our work with the school’s in-house marketing team.
Finally, here are some taglines we admire
Many of our clients have fantastic taglines:
- OES: Supporting student success. A powerful tagline that resonates with OES’s prime audience of university and higher education decision-makers.
- Dahlsens: For the builder. Dahlsens uses its tagline to connect directly with its key audience of builders and tradies.
- Methodist Ladies’ College: World-ready women. MLC used this tagline for more than 5 years to differentiate itself within Melbourne’s crowded independent girls’ school market.
And we have to mention Content Empire’s tagline: Engaging audiences, building brands. These four words go to the heart of our services and our work with clients in the content and communications space.
Can we help your business or brand develop a high impact, memorable tagline? Let’s talk.