For years now we’ve been suggesting to clients that their tagline should be two to four words long … not one, and avoid five or more. While watching the Patriots beat the Giants last night (GO PATS!) we were treated with three relatively new two-word corporate taglines:

• Wendy’s …€” “That’s Right”
• Miller Lite …€” “Good Call”
• Radio Shack …€” “Do Stuff”

Fabulously brand oriented, not product/service specific and oozing with nuance and meaning. All I can say is “I’m Lovin’ It.”

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For years I’ve talked about the benefits of brevity in tagline development. My usual pitch recommends the creation of a two to four word blurb. Then I usually give the one example of, what I believe to be, a great tagline that is five words long … Dodge Truck’s “Grab Life By The Horns.” These five syllables contain soooo much brand emotion, and the individual words are so short and fluid, there’s almost no detrimental impact that burdens other five-word taglines.

Well, I’ll no longer be able to use this tagline as an example anymore as the company is shortening the tagline down to the much simpler “Grab Life”.

All I can say is BRAVO! The new line is tighter, faster, easier to remember and loses very little brand impact. This is a nice transition and a bold move …. (oops, wrong automaker.)

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Watch the Academy Awards tomorrow night and keep an eye on the tube during the commercials. Bank of America is unveiling its new brand strategy, including a new tagline. The company’s previous tagline, “Higher Standards”, is being removed from all of their national advertising.

Want to guess if the new tagline will follow these rules?

…€¢ Super short
…€¢ LOTS of information/emotion
…€¢ Oriented to the corporate brand
…€¢ NOT oriented to the banks products/services

Expect BofA’s relatively new agency (The Omnicom Group - as of August 2005) to come up with a good one. I know I’m definitely more excited about this than if Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) wins the award for “Best Adapted Screenplay”.

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Thinking of taking your brand “international?” If you do, don’t just stick the words into Babelfish and hope for the best. Here’s an article from Moronland.net with 13 hilarious reasons why NOT to do that!

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OK kids, put on your thinking caps! If you’ve been reading the last 10-11 posts, you’ve noticed that they’re almost all about “naming”. This includes coming up with creative corporate taglines.

A contest: IT Security Geek Chris Cactus has been using the moniker of “Rude Cactus” for three years. He now needs help coming up with a new tagline! Apparently “putting the suck in succulent” just isn’t cutting it. Although he has made it a point that the top prize will NOT be either a puppy OR a hooker, I think this would be a good exercise for us all to give this naming exercise a try. GOOD LUCK (you’ve got until next Thursday)!

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Bank of America uses the tagline “Higher Standards”. If this is true, and if they were to apply these standards to the process of communicating their brand internally to their “associates”, what kind of training would you expect to be implemented? How about an intensive three day session on how to communicate the corporate brand?! It’s THAT important. What are you doing for your employees to teach them your brand values?

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A la Nick Usborne (in his classic book Net Words) we use the term “velocity” to describe the power of taglines.  What’s a tagline you say?  Some call it a slogan, some call it a memory hook, some call it a motto … think “Just do it”.

Velocity, in this case, is a combination of two attributes;  MORE information and emotion and LESS words and letters.  The farther you take each of these attributes, the more velocity you get.  So, let’s look at “Just do it”.  There’s a huge amount of emotional energy and meaning behind just 3 words and 8 letters.  WOW!  From a velocity perspective, this could be the best tagline on the planet.  No wonder that when you bring up the topic, most people will use this as the example that first pops into their mind.  Coincidence … I don’t think so.

BUT, if we’re going for short, what about one word taglines?  Some examples:

• Hewlett Packard: Invent
• Honda: Thinking
• United Airlines: Rising
• Hertz Rental Cars: Exactly

Let’s Compare Honda’s “Thinking” with Apple’s “Think Different”.  There’s something about the combination of two or three words that adds nuance and extra meaning.  It’s the juxtaposition of those two special words that adds one of the key elements to the velocity of the tagline … information.  Don’t get me wrong, if you’re going to go short for the sake of making things easy to remember then using a single word works.  It’s just not  fast enough for my liking.

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