Retail Voodoo is a brand development firm. Our past clients include Starbucks, KIND, REI, Essentia, Pepsi, HighKey and many other market leaders.
We provide strategic brand positioning and design
services for leading brands in the food, wellness, beverage, and fitness industries. If your goal is to increase market share, drive growth or disrupt the marketplace with new, innovative ideas —give us a call and let‘s talk.
Address
Retail Voodoo 3513 NE
Phone & Email
Phone: 206.285.6900
Email: info@retail-voodoo.com
Web & Social
Website: www.retail-voodoo.com
LinkedIn: Retail Voodoo
Facebook: @retailvoodoo
Instagram: @retailvoodoo
Twitter: @retailvoodoo
Written by David Lemley President and Head of Strategy at Retail Voodoo
For a food or beverage brand, a tagline has the power to capture consumers’ attention in a fractured, fast-moving world. A killer tagline is also incredibly difficult to come up with — especially if you’re trying to bolt a magic phrase onto an existing (or nonexistent) brand strategy.
We think of a great tagline as a Haiku that captures your brand’s essence and calls deeply to your present and future fan base.
This white paper reveals our process for developing a tagline and guidance on when and how to use it across your brand’s communication platforms.
Betcha can’t eat just one.
Bunny of approval.
Choosy mothers choose Jif.
Kid tested, mother approved.
Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.
Even if we obscured the brand names in the above taglines, you’d still know what products they’re associated with. The food and beverage categories are full of examples of brands with great taglines — and then, of course, there are consumer brand taglines like Think Different and Just Do It, whose owners I don’t even have to mention; they’re so well understood.
Taglines are more important today than ever for food and beverage brands because consumers’
attention spans are at an all-time low. At the same time, the ephemeral nature of social media and the constant distraction of our mobile devices leave us craving context and meaning. This inattention/ longing paradox is something a killer tagline can resolve: It registers and communicates at a glance.
A great tagline can attract attention, delineate your brand in people’s minds, and create memorability in a crowded or commoditized category. This single piece of messaging has the power to get people to build a relationship with you.
That’s a lot to ask of a few words.
Just Do It is deceptively simple. But there’s a solid strategy behind great taglines. So what is the best strategy for your brand? The short answer is: It depends.
I was having this discussion recently with a brilliant client, someone with a pedigreed resume and several brand wins under their belt. We disagreed on the proper function of a tagline. They insisted it must describe product features and functions within the context of the brand’s category. I think I may have fallen asleep during the long lecture, but when I awoke, I decided that I needed to draft a white paper on the topic.
My disagreement with my client boiled down to a point of confusion among marketers: tagline vs. slogan.
A tagline is a single, powerful message about the brand.
A slogan is a short, memorable phrase representing a product’s appeal, around which ad campaigns are built. Let’s look again to Nike for examples of how these two marketing phrases operate.
The Nike brand tagline is Just Do It.
But Nike marketers have historically deployed lots of other slogans to support individual product lines and sports where it has a major presence. Here are a few:
Risk Everything Bo Knows Winning takes care of everything.
Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.
A tagline stands above. It is a brand-level phrase. It builds a deep connection of shared pursuit between the brand and its fans. It endures.
A slogan, by contrast, is pegged to a marketing or advertising campaign. Different product lines within the brand portfolio might have different slogans. And those slogans can change over time. The Frito Lay tagline is, Food for the fun of it, and
Think of a tagline as a Haiku—they’re creative yet meaningful, conveying information in a highly condensed form, often metaphorically.
then the Cheetos product line carries the slogan, The cheese that goes crunch. A logical hierarchy.
Another way to consider the role of a tagline is to think about what it isn’t.
A tagline is not:
• a mission statement, maxim, or motivational phrase for employees
• a generic description of your product or brand
• a proverb, story, or lesson
It’s best to think of a tagline as a Haiku—the three-line Japanese poetry form with prescribed
syllable counts. They’re creative yet meaningful, conveying information in a highly condensed form, often metaphorically.
There are several different types of taglines:
About … communicates the brand mission and purpose
Functional … describes how the brand improves customers’ lives
Persuasive … conveys brand character, values, or personality
Provocative … appeals to a specific audience and invites a response
Let’s face it: Crafting a tagline is really hard. It’s 1000% harder when you try to retrofit it onto an established brand. We’ve found that the most effective taglines emerge as part of the brand or rebrand strategy process. This is not a marketing project; it’s a broader undertaking that involves contributors from across the organization. It happens almost organically, as we lead the internal leadership team and employees through the work of crystallizing the brand’s mission and values. During those conversations, words and phrases naturally emerge, echo, and float to the top. We listen for language that gets heads nodding in approval, that people latch onto and start using, that shows up in emails and presentations.
More to the point, tagline development happens well in advance of creative execution. When it emerges from the strategy process,
a tagline helps leadership teams and employees envision the future. It brings to life the mission/vision/values that the brand hangs its hat on.
The tools for developing a brand tagline have changed in the past few years; pre-pandemic we used inperson listening and working sessions focused on brand language to spitball and refine ideas. Today, we assemble teams working independently, using Google keyword searches or wordmapping or dictionaries or whatever tools they prefer. This asynchronous process allows us to dig deeper and work faster to refine the idea.
Once we’ve established a list of potential taglines, we’ll vet them with brand employees and with audience research. We look at those two spheres of influence and make sure that the phrase resonates with both groups and invites them into the brand’s world.
Our objectives for the brand tagline:
Be remarkable — pithy, edgy, disruptive, engaging, emotional
Be different — distinguished from competitors in the category
Be honest — without hyperbole (e.g., “best,” “better,” “#1,” etc.)
While some look to Apple and Nike and think the tagline’s gotta be short and sweet, that isn’t a hard rule. A short phrase can be catchy and memorable, sure — such as the
tagline we developed for Essentia that helped cement the brand’s position. We called their audience profile “overachievers” … and as that concept began to inform all other aspects of our strategy work, and even the company culture, we made it into a tagline: Overachieving H20.
Too brief, though, and the tagline loses meaning or becomes generic.
As an example, Time Warner’s tagline Enjoy Better is utterly forgettable and could apply to any company.
Conventional marketing wisdom says to use a brand tagline consistently across different touch points (media advertising, in-store signage, Facebook page, employee uniforms, etc.). But we advocate for a modern and more nuanced approach that’s strategic and flexible. For example, does your tagline belong on your package? Again, the short answer is: It depends.
There’s an art to the tagline and its usage based on audience,channel, and price point. In some applications, adding the tagline feels too marketing-y. You may opt to leave it off the pack and let the audience project their own meaning onto the brand. On social media, though, the tagline might serve as a rallying cry. Let the brand’s tone and voice guide when and where you apply the tagline.
The application of the tagline can evolve over time (though the wording remains constant). For example,
we worked with REI to help them reinvent their internal operations and reposition the brand. With origins as a co-op for wilderness enthusiasts, the organization was staffed with hard-core hikers and climbers and had become insular and unwelcoming to casual outdoor types. We came up with the tagline, Get Outside Yourself, to help change the institutional thinking, and it became an external phrase to attract those casual fans. Later, as their audience grew further, we advised them to limit the tagline’s exposure, so it was something that was kind of hidden instead of overt on every product tag.
Once a brand reaches Beloved & Dominant status — the pinnacle of achievement for brands that people simply can’t do without — then it no longer requires a tagline to do the ‘splainin’ for it. Apple, after all, doesn’t need Think Different anymore.
Crafting and using a killer tagline, even one as simple as Just Do It, is hard. Really hard. We happen to be pretty good at taglines. Let’s talk about how we can help your team identify and communicate your brand’s essence.
The guide for brand-owners, marketers, investors, and leaders to take their better-for-you brand from one of many to category prominence. Empowers your team to conduct a category audit unlike any other. Beloved & Dominant Brands will have you and your team asking questions about your company, your brands, and your marketplace that you have never asked before.
We are a branding agency passionate about building brands that connect powerfully with consumers. The brands we partner with take a stand: For people, purpose, and planet. We guide clients to solve complex business challenges so they can evolve into category leaders that consumers actively love with their mind, body, and souls.