We’ve recently been doing a lot of tagline research for companies. Part of our process involves asking the client what they want from their tagline, who is their target audience and what would they like a customer or prospect to remember if they read their tagline once. These are only some of the tactics we employ, but you get the point.
Invariably as we discuss this, clients ask, “what are some of the best taglines and how can I create that?” It’s a hard question to answer, but we know one thing: all great taglines were researched heavily.
No successful business tagline is derived from a great idea and then thrown out into the world. There needs to be research done. Target customers and prospects need to be involved. There needs to be Q&A done at multiple levels and the process is iterative.
While this tagline research seems tedious it is often the part that is overlooked the most and ironically, the key part that takes a company from a tagline of “Best shoes on earth” to something with more long-term visceral power like “Just Do It”
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Research certainly has a place in discovering consumer insights, but you need to be very careful in exposing emotive taglines to research groups. People tend to want to make a ‘smart’, intellectual response in front of peers and researchers, so they ‘think’ about the line in a way which is not how they would respond in real life situation.
‘JDI’ is a case in point. History has it that the line in fact tanked badly in research. But Wieden Kennedy and the client believed in it, so they proceeded despite research.
Often an original, emotive line will have no apparent meaning to consumers until it has been ‘given’ one through promotion.