‘You fire, we aim’ seemed to nicely sum up a service that re-formatted mobile content for different handsets. ‘Think like a user, test like an engineer.’ works well for a client that does end-to-end testing of mobile services. And they shorten it to simply, ‘Think like a user’ in different contexts. ‘Profit on demand.’ has energy and attitude for a client that provides digital proposition management for on-demand services like IPTV.But we’ve always shied away from having a strapline of our own. It’s partly a cobbler’s children thing — client work tends to trump in-house buffing & shining. But its also a vague feeling that straplines (or ‘taglines’ as some people call them) can be uncomfortably reductive. Sure the consumer guys need their straplines, but they also go in for jingles and celebrity spokesmodels. Do we B2B marketers need the slick stuff? Can we really boil down entire complex propositions into a few words? What’s a strapline really for anyway? There are some things a good strapline can do:
- Indicate the business you’re in
- Communicate a benefit or two
- Gently counter a misleading connotation in the company name (I think US Shoe must have confronted this problem when it sold off its footwear division)
- Add a bit of attitude
- Help associate your name with an idea
- Smuggle in a message with the logo (useful for the times when the logo & strap will be on their own, on an event banner or a sponsor list.)
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