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1
Do the need test. Ask yourself: do I really need a slogan? If so, is it really little more than a rallying cry for the internal teams? Are those words only there because you can’t bear to do the hard marketing work through creative innovation and branding expertise?
3
Be expressive. Expression trumps description. “You, but on a good day” is a beautiful expression of the creative idea for Berocca tablets, as is “you’re not you when you’re hungry” for Snickers: these therefore slip effortlessly into our memory banks because they combine emotion with meaning. Avoid, at all costs, phrases such as “servicing your infrastructure”.
2
Don’t lose F.A.C.E. Personality is neglected in brand literature. Humans tend to respond better to the softer elements of a brand and communication than to the rational messaging of so much communication. Lasting brand memories will be better created by an appeal to F.A.C.E – feeling, atmosphere, culture and experience – than by relentless bombardment with facts
4
Beware compression. Stella Artois’s ‘Be Legacy’ attempts to tie into the advertising concept of leaving something behind, just as the founder of the beer did, but it feels clumsy and sounds more like a parting farewell from Mr Spock. Meanwhile, ‘I am Train’ sounds rather like the early utterances of a computer trying a little too hard to pass the Turing test.
5 — Trainer, lecturer and strategist Anthony Tasgal is author of The Storytelling Book, runner up in the global Marketing Book of the Year award 2016. Tweet him @taswellhill
Look to the best. We should all aspire to come up with a line as powerful, memorable and effective as the slogan for Specsavers. When they hear this word, anyone within the optician’s core market of the UK is automatically flooded with a variety of associations, feelings and images. Chief among them will be the brand’s classic slogan: ‘Should have gone to Specsavers’. Q3 2016 Dialogue
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11/05/2016 14:36