Brew-Ha-Ha

Inspiration was the keyword of the day when our First Lady made her historic and memorable visit to Merced last month. In an indirect way, the event inspired me to write about what makes a good tagline and how to approach writing one.

The topic choice was sparked by a brochure the city published for the first-ever Cap & Town event. It had the newish, theater-tower Merced logo paired with a tagline that proclaimed our city was “Inventing California’s Future” in teeny-tiny type that most people probably didn’t even notice. But a good marketer notices these things because a tagline is a very important and powerful element of marketing.

A tagline is the slogan partnered with your logo that states a clear, meaningful message or promise about your brand. A good tagline enriches your identity by stating something essential that will make a lasting, memorable impression on all of your audiences.

Just do it. The Uncola. When you care enough to send the very best. We try harder. Fly the friendly skies (a tagline I believe was mistakenly dropped in the 90s. Then again, maybe dropping it reflects how flying isn’t so friendly, anymore). These classic lines made you think of their associated brands: Nike, 7-Up, Hallmark, Avis and United Airlines. Somewhere in your memory banks, you have dozens more just waiting to resurface and remind.

Often, taglines are clever, but it’s not necessary to be clever. It’s more important to be clear than clever, and you heard that from a marketing creative. Cleverness does not equal creativeness in the communications business. Even Samantha’s magically-created ideas to help out her husband Darren on the TV series Bewitched were relevant to their purpose.

Taglines come in all shapes and sizes and styles. Some are timeless. Some are out-grown over time. Sometimes they are very direct. Sometimes abstract. They can help change your positioning in a category or communicate a new benefit. They may identify a unique function or character, or just state a desirable outcome. Whatever purpose the message serves, a good tagline should positively affect the perception of your brand.

Like all communications, the simpler the better. But getting to the few simple words that will resonate with your market and stakeholders is an effort of hard work and perspiration.

You start with the answers to the essential questions for all good communications efforts: Who are you and what do you do? What are your goals? What core values guide your actions? What makes you different than the competition? What is your brand promise? What are your strengths in your category? Who comprises your entire audience? What are the hot buttons? What needs can you satisfy?

Then decide what will make a tagline “the one” for you. What criteria will you use to determine which taglines work and which ones don’t? Deciding the parameters from an objective, strategic frame of mind before venturing into brainstorming will help keep you from being swayed by a very clever, but off-strategy choice. Be sure to give the process some time so you can sleep on it.

Here are some suggested guidelines for writing a good tagline:

* Develop a long list of ideas; don’t throw anything out.
* Don’t try to force-fit a keyword for your category.
* Focus on the concepts, not how many words it takes.
* Look for inspiration everywhere and anywhere, even unlikely places.
* Be absolutely clear to the market niche you are serving.
* Be sure to reflect who you really are and what you’re about.
* Create a message that is uniquely your own.

To take it to a more advanced step, look at how a tagline you’re considering might speak to your market, to your partners (suppliers, distributors, sales channels) and to your own staff (internal communications are often forgotten, but build valuable teamwork). Your tagline won’t convey the same meaning to each audience; we all bring our own perspectives. But the best lines speak to all customers and all stakeholders in one way or another.

Which brings me back to the inspiration, “Inventing California’s Future”. It’s a nice aspiration for Merced, but perhaps a tad overreaching. Is it who we really are and what we really do? In the context of our city’s brand identity, does it ring true to our guests? To ourselves? To all of our community stakeholders?

Sweating your way through the process of creating a tagline for your business, or municipality, is a worthwhile investment that will help clarify who you are and what you do, making all of your marketing communications exponentially more effective.

That’s the power of a good tagline.

Last weekend, I found myself sipping a cold one in San Francisco and thinking.

Creative. Good, effective creative. Just what is it? And why is it valuable to any business, especially one short on marketing dollars?

So there I was, with a window view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Alcatraz glowed in the sunset light. Coit Tower silhouetted in the purple sky. I was savoring an especially tasty ice-cold Anchor Steam and a freshly steamed Dungeness Crab served with sourdough bread. And I realized I was enjoying a delicious San Francisco branding lesson, bolstered by years of marketing content featuring romanticized iconic images of the city. Tourism Marketing 101.

The connection to the city brand was galvanized with just a handful of details that identify Fisherman’s Wharf, a differentiator that is only San Francisco. Nothing else like it. Visiting family, first-time guests to the city, needed little explanation of where we were and what we were seeing. Fisherman’s Wharf. Quintessential San Francisco. Well branded.

Around the time I was getting a second beer, the bigger picture came into focus. Creative is how you call attention to your brand. It’s the skill set that defines the difference between two brands by distilling key selling points down to one relevant message. Relevant to the brand. Relevant to the customer.

On the drive back home (not on the same day the Anchor Steam kissed my lips), I admired the Apple iPod nano billboards – part of a multi-media campaign. Simple. Single message. There they are. Nine iPod nanos lined up in a neat row featuring the nine colors, dripping from the bottom of the product images like so many splotches of paint. And a brand logo. That’s it. The product feature of color options needs no words. The art direction is engaging. Thought provoking. You might even have thoughts about what color fits your spouse, child, sibling, … your friends. This is the personal music player that fits your personality, anyone’s personality, with color. There is no mention of the many great iPod features. Just one. One message will do. It’s conveyed by one seemingly simple image that’s used across every medium.

One more example before I get to the point. Another effective billboard I saw is from a campaign I don’t even like – for Geico auto insurance. But I have to admit, the billboard reinforces the message of the TV and radio very well. The visual is that silly stack of money with the jiggly eyes on top. The headline is straight from the campaign’s script: The Money You Could Be Saving. Then there’s a Geico logo. And that’s it. Good solid outdoor advertising with one simple message.

San Francisco, Apple and Geico – their marketing messages all have one thing in common. They tell the truth. Good, effective creative always reveals the truth. Despite urban myth, creative is not about cleverness, though sometimes it’s clever. It’s not about trickery, though sometimes it uses tricks. And it’s definitely not about fooling people. That would be called a marketing con, not marketing creative.

So just what is creative? It’s the simple communication that tells the story about what makes you unique in your field. Not just another insurance business, but the one that’s served the community the longest. Not just another florist, but the one with more flower varieties. Not just another shoe store, but the one with exclusive, desirable brands. Whatever makes your business “the one”, great creative delivers the message in a meaningful and relevant way. The truth.

Key Characteristics of Great Creative:

1. true to the brand identity and look

2. true to the brand voice and message

3. true to the markets the brand serves

Why is good creative especially valuable for marketers with small budgets? To start with, the same old approach, at best, will reap the same old results. More likely, a tired image and message will be ineffective and lost in the clutter. Another value to any marketer is that the creative process forces a conversation about your brand identity, your core values, your key markets, your strengths, your weaknesses, and even your relevance as a product or service. This leads to realistic goals, a focused message, a targeted strategy, and tactics that earn the best return. So you don’t waste good money on poor marketing efforts.

And that’s the money you could be saving – perhaps for an Anchor Steam at Fisherman’s Wharf.

Have you ever seen a poorly designed logo or advertisement, brochure or packaging, even a messy sales contract or PowerPoint presentation, and noticed how it impacted your impression about the business?

Even if you haven’t noticed, the way a company presents itself affects the way you perceive its professionalism. Look around with a keen eye and you’ll see plenty of candidates here in the Central Valley noteworthy for their “pathetic aesthetic”.

Perhaps someone had the brilliant idea to save money by letting a sister-in-law who used to like art in school create “the look”, instead of hiring a designer. Or maybe it’s just something that’s outlived its historical genre in design. Whatever the reason, at the core is an undervaluing of design and creativity, without consideration of the basic business measurement of return on investment.

“What?” you may ask. How do “design” and “return on investment” possibly go together in the same sentence or breath? Aren’t those literally from different schools of thought? The Institutes of Left and Right Brain?

Well, for those who doubt that great design is “all that” for a business, there’s an eye-opening phenomenon reported in an online post at MarketingProfs.com by Ted Mininni, president of a metro New York brand design consultancy. Our upcoming crop of MBAs may need to pass a design course to get that business degree.

According to the article, some leading business schools – big brand names of academia like Harvard, Georgetown, UC Berkeley and Northwestern – are adding design and creative thinking courses.

Stanford University is even creating a new Institute of Design to teach design strategy to both business and design students. Design schools are getting on board by adding business courses for graduate level design students.

Many industry leaders already embrace a design-centric approach to their business, products and marketing. Procter & Gamble, Samsung, IBM, Harley-Davidson, BMW, Apple, Disney and Dell are among them. In a recent Fast Company interview, Alan G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble explained,

“We want to design the purchasing experience …We want to design every component of the product; and we want to design the communication experience and the user experience. I mean, it’s all design.” Business Week’s editor-in-chief, Steven J. Adler, has tagged this trend as the “rise of the Creativity Economy.”

So how does the “Creativity Economy” relate to business in Merced? We are not immune to significant trends or the tangible and intangible effects of creative execution. Just choosing the wrong photo or using the wrong word can impact a business’s image. So can that logo designed by the untrained sister-in-law in 1980.

Keeping abreast of major trends helps generate fresh ideas that achieve better performance from marketing tools, product development and even business strategy. So a little mash-up of analytical and design skills can improve customer experiences and create stronger brand loyalties that take full advantage of the brand equity. When you nurture both rational and emotional connections to your brand, you’re a rock star of your business niche.

As markets get tighter and competition gets stiffer in the months ahead, the businesses with the best image and message will gain market share. It’s a predictable cycle. Those that value great design and quality creative execution – the ones that spend marketing dollars on the thinking and the look of all their communications, not just the production – will fare better than those that don’t. For all the intangibles of design and marketing creative, that’s a very tangible return on investment.