Healthcare taglines are particularly interesting to me because the vocabulary available to draw from tends to be very limited. That’s why so many hospital taglines sound like every other hospital’s tagline. It’s all variations on “care” or “caring”, “medicine”, “technology” or “innovation”, “Live” or “life”, “health”, “state of the art” or “advanced” or “world class”, and, no doubt, a half dozen other words. Having written at least a score of hospital taglines myself, I know I’ve often found myself boxed in by these words. The challenge is to somehow find a twist or turn that freshens the thought. For example, St. Luke’s line, mentioned in a previous post, is State of The Art Humanity.That surprising juxtaposition does a great job of communicating the two pronged “high tech/high touch” benefit that most hospitals try to convey. The tagline I wrote for Rush Health System here in Chicago contained the terms “medicine”, “you” and “world class”, making it potentially horrible. But my job was to convey one of those two pronged benefits. In Rush’s case, they truly do have “world class” medicine going on there. And they’re model is, at least theoretically, “patient-centered”. So I was able to convey both of those benefits while employing a subtle play on “world” and “revolve.” The line was “Where World Class Medicine Revolves Around You.” So I was able to overcome, to some extent anyway, the limitations of the tiny  hospital tagline vocabulary.

Advocate, A local health system, has a new tagline, Inspiring Medicine. Changing Lives. It’s an unremarkable line, but worthy of comment anyway, for this reason. This two part formula is common, especially with hospitals. The problem is that there needs to be a parallelness to the two parts. In this case, it’s missing. The first word of each half of this tagline needs to be the same kind of word. If one is an adjective, the other needs to be an adjective as well. That’s what makes it parallel. Unfortunately, Advocate apparently didn’t get the word. Of course, you could read “Inspiring” as a verb, so that it would be parallel to “Changing”, but read that way, the line doesn’t make sense. Who’s inspiring whom, or what? It seems clear that “Inspiring” is intended as an adjective. Okay, but what if “Changing” is read as an adjective, which is theoretically possible. Again, it doesn’t make sense. In order to read the line in a way that actually communicates, the parallelism collapses.

Some of the best two-part, parallel taglines intentionally employ at least one word that can be read two ways, (verb/adjective, verb/noun or whatever) and both senses make sense in the context of the line, and, indeed, enrich the meaning of the line considerably.

The Advocate line doesn’t do this, and doesn’t even succeed in its attempted parallelism.

Too bad they didn’t call me to help with that line.

It’s interesting that many recent, decent taglines out there are for brands that are, shall we say, less than upscale, or are mundane and utilitarian.

Take Beano Before. And there’ll be no gas.

Valspar. The Beauty Goes On.

Pam Helps You Pull It Off.

Kashi. Seven Whole Grains On A Mission.

Benedryl. You Can’t Pause Life.

And now Old Country Buffet has a new campaign anchored by the tagline, The Land Of &. I envy the economy and resonance of this line, which captures, perfectly and unapologetically, the differessence of OCB. The use of an ampersand in place of the word “and” is a beautiful touch. Not only is the ampersand far more elegant to look at than a plain old “and”, it also engages the brain for a microsecond in order to translate the symbol into the word, and then recognize the assonance between “land” and “and”.

For years, my mock tagline for Old Country Buffet has been Mediocre Food. And Lots Of It. In deference to the new line, I promise to stop invoking my line whenever the subject comes up. At least for awhile.

In contrast, I call your attention to a campaign that my brother called to my attention to recently.  It’s the current Honda campaign touting some promotion, the details of which elude me. The campaign which features an animated fellow, “Mr. Opportunity”—kind of a dufus, who does a lot of knocking, all within various otherwise live action contexts. The obvious question this campaign raises, aside from WHY the Honda folks thought that making Mr. Opportunity a badly executed, sophomoric cartoon guy might be a good idea, is this:

Is it opportunity that’s knocking, as they hope we’ll pick up on? Or is it Honda engines, as one’s mind immediately goes to when the term “knock” is introduced in a car commercial?

In fairness, there is one nice line in these commercials that says something about how the promotion “is the only thing in a Honda that won’t last.” But that one line isn’t enough to forgive the aforementioned, far more egregious aspects this campaign.

Having just gotten back from a 4500 mile road trip to and through Montana, a few things stuck in my head, mixed in amongst the squashed bugs and pebbles that chipped the windshield of my mind.

First, healthcare advertising continues to be predictable and uninteresting everywhere. Imagine that. But I was pleased to see a couple of taglines that were a notch above the usual pablum, if only barely. United Healthcare’s line, which I hadn’t seen before, Health In Numbers, contains a nice play. The line relies heavily on the TV ads to interpret the thought so as not to come off too cold and calculating, as the prominence of “numbers” in the tagline might suggest. Not earthshaking, but better than average.

Better than that line, however, is the tagline for St. Luke’s, somewhere in Minnesota. Their line: State Of The Art Humanity. It’s such a simple thing. By applying that impossibly cliched term, “State of the art”, which is always about technology and medical advances, to the caring side of the healthcare equation instead, it de-sentimentalizes the “caring” part, while at the same time giving it a refreshing prominence. And, even though there is no mention of the technological/advanced medicine part of the equation, somehow “state of the art”, used in this refreshing way, has a subtle connotative halo that feels like it somehow applies to the medicine side, without suffering from cliche-itis.

Nicely done. Glad to see someone out there is thinking.

I saw A LOT of semis carrying the usual empty taglines touting Innovative Customer Service and providing The Road to Success. While I didn’t see any lines that knocked me over, I thought that Knight Transportation’s line, Your Hometown National Carrier, at least attempted to express an actual brand position, so I applaud them, however feebly, for that.

I smiled at the tagline of one small town: Kremlin, MT. USA Style.

While I didn’t catch the brand name, I was intrigued by one business we passed—a winery/car wash.

I would like to salute the E Z Mark Casino in Harlem, Montana for their refreshing honesty and forthrightness.

As we drove through the Beartooth Mountains, which can truly be described as Majestic, I reflected back on the name of one of those generic, utilitarian, decidedly mundane self-storage facilities we had passed early in our trip. The brand name: Majestic Storage. I would love to ask the guy who cooked up that name what he was thinking.

“Look, honey, have you ever SEEN anything so awesome and breathtaking as those STORAGE UNITS? Quick, get the camera!”

Apparently, I’ve pretty much taken the summer off, blog wise. But this topic sticks in my craw chronically. It’s about this word, “real”. Below are five, count ‘em, five examples of current taglines that invoke the “r” word.

It’s Time For Real. (Hellman’s)

Nothing Is More Real Than Reddi Whip.

Wendy’s. You know when it’s real.

Xerox. Ready For Real Business.

Solo Paper Plates. Inspired By Real Life.

My question is, what the heck are they talking about? Real, as opposed to what? Fake? Virtual? Counterfeit? Artificial? Imaginary?

Do they mean real in the sense of authentic, or genuine, or natural, or what? Whatever they mean, why don’t they say THAT instead? Because this claim to being more real than the competition, whether implicit or explicit, is bogus.

Of these lines, can you find the ONE that makes some sense? Right, it’s the Solo Paper Plates line. I can actually understand what they’re talking about. They’ve designed their plates based on information or experience derived from real life, presumably, the lives of their customers, so that the plates are up to the task for which they’re designed. Okay, so they get a pass.

But these others? Of particular perplexity is the Xerox line. As hard as I try, I can’t figure out what they even INTEND to mean by this use of “real”. Real business, as opposed to what? It’s baffling. At least, with the others, I can guess that they’re invoking “real” in contrast to some vague sort of artificial/manufactured/unnatural/chemical alternative.

Of course, this distinction doesn’t bear much scrutiny before it collapses one way or the other. After all, everything shares an ontological status as equally real, until you start poking around the edges, like with dreams, hallucinations and the like. On the other hand, from someone like Michael Moore’s perspective, everything, if you dig around enough, is to some degree artificial or manipulated, affected, contaminated, violated in some way by human activity.

So the claim to being real, or more real, is either trivial, maybe even tautological, or else it’s just plain false. Either way, it seems like a bad idea, raising more questions that it answers, and not just straining, but outright stomping on, credibility.

Really.

That’s the tagline for Redneckbank.com, the internet banking division of The Bank of The Wichitas, which has been generating a lot of buzz.

I confess I was knocked over by my initial experience of their website. When your first assumption upon visiting a site is that it’s a joke, and then it turns out to be real, and it’s a bank, wow, that is some impressive accomplishment.

My disappointment with the whole experience is that they cop out—failing to carry even a smidgeon of the personality on the home page into the nuts and bolts pages that follow. They immediately distance themselves from the whole redneck and retreat into the same dang banking-ese throughout the rest of the site.

I’d love to know how this online bank is doing.

I’d love to know who their customers are.

I’d love to know if rednecks think this bank, or at least its homepage, is hilarious and worthy of their business, or do they feel patronized, condescended to, resentful of the stereotype.

I’d love to know what ad agency came up with, and more important, SOLD this idea to the client. An astounding feat, even if only on the home page.

As for the tagline, it certainly captures this banks’ differessence perfectly. When I hear a newscaster or other presumably intelligent, well-educated person use the word “funner” it grates. I’m embarrassed for them. But for these guys, dad gummit,  they should absolutely use that term.

Sometimes a good tagline is just a really simply, straightforward not-even-slightly-catchy proclamation that makes clear the one thing that a brand stands for above all else. No pretense. No cleverness. No industry catch phrase or word du jour.

As I headed to my branch office today (known to others as Burger King) a big moving van drove by. Allied Van Lines. And emblazoned right below the name on the side of the truck, was their tagline:

The Careful Movers.

Now, granted, if I were given the assignment to write a tagline for Allied that focuses on how careful they are, I would likely have gone directly to the consumer benefit that results from their attribute of being careful. From the consumer’s perspective, this means my stuff doesn’t get lost or broken. At the end of the move, I have the same stuff, in the same condition, than I did at the beginning.

Same Stuff. Different Place.

Nevertheless, there’s something to be said for glomming onto one thing you want the brand to represent, and not trying to wedge several other things in there just to cover your butt. The tagline could easily have been

Careful. Cost-efficient. Caring.

That diffusion of the brand renders it meaningless.

But Allied had the guts to pick one thing. I’m sure they have research that tells them people care about their stuff arriving intact more than arriving on time or not costing too much. So, rather than picking the top two or three things people care about and spreading their tagline  thin to include them all, diminishing the potency of the line in the process, they understood that the essence of strategy is sacrifice.

In case anyone reading this blog thinks I’m not capable of a good angry rant now and then, let me disown you of that misperception.

It’s endlessly astounding to me that so many businesses out there, easily the vast majority of them, don’t have even the slightest understanding of many of the most obvious truths about how to run a business successfully. I recommend, for example, that every business take a moment to consider the wisdom of the Golden Rule, and try applying it to the way they run their businesses. Clearly few businesses have done this simple exercise. I’m pretty sure some large percentage of business owners believe that, as long as their company supports some worthy causes with a tax deductible check, or a few hours of their time, anything goes regarding how they conduct business on a daily basis. Squeeze your employees. Manipulate your customers. Dabble in that grey area that blurs ethical and unethical, scrupulous and unscrupulous. Pay lip service to philosophies and values that you then violate every day. Dog eat dog, right? But, do you really want to operate in a realm where you’re either eating, or being eaten, by dogs, for a living? What kind of way is that to spend your days?

You’re not in business to make money. You’re in business to stay in business.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve shared this insight with a business owner, just to have them smile and nod vacantly, never for a moment even considering whether this might make sense. They never get past the first half of this thought.

Here’s another one that eludes the business masses: You get what you pay for. How can you live in this country for one week, never mind 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years, and not internalize this obvious truth? Wow.

For example . . .  (You knew I’d get around to talking about taglines at some point, right?)

There are all sorts of opportunities out there online to buy yourself a tagline for $100 or so. That $100 will buy about an hour of some freelance copywriter’s time, if that, after which he’ll send you a half dozen lines, which, inevitably, will be among the most obvious possible taglines—you know, the kind you’ve already come up with yourself—because that’s as far into what needs to be a week or two-long process as a writer can get in an hour. If you don’t like any of these lines, you’re likely out of luck, and out $100. This shouldn’t surprise you. When you went to Mr. $100 tagline’s website, did he have on display any of the taglines he’s written? Probably not. And if he did, did they impress you, or did they seem kind of generic and blah?

I encourage anyone who still thinks a $100 tagline is a good value to do me a favor and go for it. If you think that $100 will buy you a tagline that will actually contribute to your business’s success, you don’t really get what a good tagline can accomplish. And how much a blah tagline can damage your brand (increasing your invisibility, making you look dumb and generic). You don’t get what it takes to create a genuinely successful tagline. And, tell the truth now, you really aren’t all that sure that marketing your business in any way is a good investment. All of which is very good news for those competitors of yours who do aggressively market themselves.

For those of you who count yourselves among this latter group, drop me an email and let’s chat.

I confess I don’t know HOW new Sony’s tagline is. All I can tell you is, it’s new to me. I saw it for the first time today as I paged through WIRED, struggling to process that visual mess of a pub.

So, the line is:

Sony.  Make • Believe

This line is so soft and squishy, so innocent and playful, I thought it might be a sub-tagline reserved for their gaming audience. But a quick visit to their website confirms that this is the umbrella tagline for the whole brand.

The line is supported by one fleeting line of copy on the home page:

Believe that anything you can imagine, you can make real.

I just love the unapologetic romance and optimism of this sentiment, especially coming from such a behemoth. The tagline condenses it beautifully. And the design of the tagline is perfect, inviting all the different interpretations and connotations packed into the line.

Consider how many ways those two words can be understood.

First, it’s simply an invocation of the child’s naive term for imagination.

Then, it is a series of possible assertions or declarations about Sony and its capabilities:We make stuff you can believe in. We make believable stuff. We make anything that we believe we can.

And, for every such assertion, there is a comparable one urging their customers to believe, to make stuff, to make stuff up, to make the leap, to believe they can make it happen, whatever it happens to be.

For a big tech company like SONY to have the self-assurance, the insight into their customers—and into what business they’re really in, to make Make • Believe their tagline, is remarkable and rare. With two simple words they put most other tech giants, from  GE on down, to shame.

There’s a furniture store in Downers Grove, Illinois, called Rossi Furniture. Like many furniture stores, they choose to advertise with cheaply produced TV spots, and their commercials are no better, no worse than all the others. BUT, I actually registered this store in my brain because their tagline was better than any other I’ve seen for a furniture store. I know that’s faint praise. Nevertheless, I want to recognize this tagline because it’s proof that small businesses CAN have good taglines, if they would just invest in them, which I bet these guys did. So here’s the tagline.

Rossi Furniture.

Furniture That Becomes Your Home.

Such a nice play. Rather than just saying that their furniture will look nice in your house, they (or, more likely, the copywriter at their ad agency) found a way to suggest that their furniture actually comes to define, or constitute, your home, at least in part. That it will become an integral part of your very personal home environment. That’s  pretty good, to jam all that connotative stuff into five words.

Early in my tagline career I came up with what I call a tagline orphan—a line I happened to think of, but with no client to sell it to. This, as it happens, was a furniture store tagline as well:

Your furnish the house. And we’ll furnish the house.

I thought it was pretty cute, but also unsellable, because any furniture store owner would judge it too hard to get, since not everyone knows anymore that the word “furnish” can mean “to provide.”

So I applaud Rossi Furniture for giving their customers credit for having half a brain. And for appreciating the value of a good tagline enough to spend some money getting one.

happy birthday to me

happy birthday dear Tagline Jim

happy birthday to me