A tagline is a short line that sits alongside your brand name and tells people something essential about you. The good ones become inseparable from the brand. The forgettable ones say “quality and innovation since 2015” and disappear.
Writing a good tagline is hard precisely because it is short. Every word has to earn its place.
What a tagline is for
A tagline can do one of several jobs:
- Explain what you do, when the name does not
- Differentiate you from competitors
- Promise a benefit
- Express your personality or attitude
Decide which job yours needs to do. Trying to do all four in five words usually means doing none of them well.
What good taglines have in common
- Brevity. Usually under seven words. Often three or four.
- Specificity. It could only belong to you, or at least to very few others.
- Truth. It describes something you actually deliver.
- Rhythm. It is pleasant to say out loud.
- Clarity. It does not need explaining.
A method for writing one
1. Start with your positioning
Write down, plainly, who you are for, what you offer and why it matters. The tagline is a distillation of this, not a separate idea.
2. Gather raw material
Collect words and phrases: how customers describe you, words from your mission, verbs that describe what the product does, feelings you want to evoke. Do not filter yet.
3. Write a lot
Write fifty options. Then a hundred. The first ones will be obvious. The good ones usually come after you have exhausted the clichés.
Try different approaches:
- An imperative (“Do more.”)
- A statement of fact
- A promise
- A twist on a familiar phrase
- A single striking word
4. Cut ruthlessly
Remove anything generic, anything a competitor could use, anything that sounds like a corporate slogan. Remove filler words. See whether each line still works with fewer words.
5. Test it
Say the shortlist out loud. Put each one under your logo, on your packaging, on your website. Show them to customers and ask what each suggests. The right one will feel obvious in context.
An example
For Retail Acuity, the brand for in-store servicing software, the promise came down to two words: do more. It is short, it is an instruction, and it says exactly what the software helps retail teams achieve. It runs on the back of every card, up the spine of the brochure and down the side of the trade show wall. A tagline that short only works because it is completely clear.
Common mistakes
- Being too clever. A pun that needs explaining is not working.
- Being too vague. “Excellence in everything” says nothing.
- Listing features. Save them for the product description.
- Changing it constantly. Taglines build value through repetition.
Do you even need one?
Not every brand does. If your name already says what you do, and your design expresses your personality, a tagline can be redundant. It is a tool, not a requirement.
If you want help finding the right words for your brand, get in touch.