A corporate tagline, also known in some quarters (but never here at Litos) as a “strapline,” offers you a unique opportunity to advance your company’s brand promise in nanoseconds. Appearing wherever your logo appears – online, on stationery or on video – it’s your ideal aide de camp in the War Against Sameness (WAS).

Only a tagline can occupy the remarkably valuable and visible marketing real estate cheek-by-jowl with your logo; paradoxically, this exact real estate is incredibly ill-suited for the appearance of anything else.

And only a tagline can simultaneously emotionalize and/or dimensionalize your brand, ingratiate it to your customers, and energize your employees.

Typically, a tag draws its animating force from the company’s core statements. The alchemy occurs in drawing out the essence of your company from these statements.

Over time, taglines have been Balkanized into a number of camps by anal-retentive types who just can’t resist categorizing things into a number of camps. These are:  descriptive, motivating/imperative (“Just do it.”), evocative, stimulating, supportive and superlative.

In terms of practical implementation, however, there is often significantly more overlap. Some of the most successful corporate taglines are in fact hybrids, conveying not just what a company does, but also its attitude and/or perspective about what it does. (GE: “We bring good things to life.”)

Candidly, there are alternatives to the thoughtful, on-strategy, brand-aware birthing of taglines.  Random tagline/slogan generators tagline/slogan generators exist, promising results that are “weird”  “funny” or “useful.” (In this case, two out of three ain’t…good.) And there will always be the purists who default to nothing/nada/no tagline, reasoning that their prospects and customers know who they are.

Right you are, Amalgamated Industries!

To see how a tagline can work for a campaign as well as a corporation, make a cool move and view our Cool Move case study.