I love the Santana song that carries that name.

What I don’t love is when a company is so undisciplined that it chooses to attempt to be everybody’s everything.

Take  Global Medical Products, for instance. They proudly display their tagline:

Clinically Driven. Patient-focused. Value-based.

In addition to being FAR too wide a swath to stick their flag into, this particular group of three claims suffers from the “pick two” syndrome. While I’m sure they’d like to achieve all three of these objectives, and who in their business wouldn’t, there is a tension between these three that calls the whole proposition into question. Call me skeptical, but I’d be impressed if even two of these attributes was true.

Do I even need to point out that this is a classic example of a tagline with the “arrows” pointed at the company rather than the customer? Sometimes you can get away with this me-centric orientation, but only if the way you characterize your own attributes is interesting, different, engaging, entertaining, surprising. This tagline is none of those things. Meanwhile, you leave it to the prospective customer to do all the work of translating your attributes into some possible benefit for them. That’s usually too much to ask. Smart brands do that work, connecting the dots so the customer doesn’t have to.

Oh, and did I mention how boring this tagline is. I have to imagine that their business, and their brand, have the potential to be a whole lot more compelling than that dry line.

Or, rather, about a vacuum. Oreck, to be specific.

Oreck’s old tagline, Clean Made Easy, was a snore. Simple, short and boring.

Then, recently I saw a new commercial for Oreck. Their new tagline is:

A Lot Goes Into It.

Wow. SO much better. Again, so simple, pretty compact, but that quiet little play on words, both meanings of which allude to brand-differentiating stories, is so nice. Not blindingly brilliant. Not unforgettable. In fact, between the time I saw the commercial and I sat down to write this post, I, in fact, forgot what the line was. It took a bit of searching. But it was worth it, because I got to enjoy it again upon rediscovery.

As near as I can tell, this line was created by the Buntin Group in Nashville. If this is true, kudos to whomever wrote it there.

Alexian Brothers Health System has a campaign, unremarkable, as far as I can recall, but with a pretty good tagline:

Our Passion Is Powerful Medicine.

A really tight play on words, and either way you read the meaning applies equally well to their benefit. It’s interesting how, as the sadly limited lexicon of words being used in healthcare taglines is being used up, the word “passion” has become more acceptable. In 1990, when I tried to sell a hospital client on a tagline that made use of the word “passion”, they balked. While they couldn’t articulate their concern very well, it became clear that, in a classic case of overthink, they felt it might be seen as having a slightly salacious connotation.

I’m sure there are still clients who would have this discomfort with the word, but I’ve seen several examples of healthcare brands that have taken the leap and chosen to use the word in their taglines.

The other tagline that caught my eye was for Habitat Corporate Suites Network, an unfortunately clunky brand name.Their tagline is:

We’re the people you stay with.

Not exactly a new bit of word play within the hospitality industry, but this particular articulation works particularly well. While it carries much of the same intention as New York Life’s The Company You Keep, since it’s a different industry, it doesn’t feel at all like a knockoff.

I do love the well-played play on words. It makes a short burst of language work twice as hard, and tickles the brain, thus imbedding the thought more effectively into that brain. And, as with these two examples, there is zero groan factor in a truly well-crafted play.

Duluth Trading Company makes work clothes. They have a very entertaining, quirky TV ad campaign that I’m smitten with. Yet, they don’t seem to have a tagline. Instead, they seem to have something resembling a tagline for each line of clothes they feature in their tv spots. For example, on of their clothing lines is Flex Fire Hose Work Pants. The commercial that focuses on this clothes line ends with what I initially took to be their tagline:

Crouch Climb Conquer Comfortably

But then I saw a commercial featuring Duluth Buck Naked Underwear, and the list of benefits was different, which makes sense. But it is structured and placed in more or less the position where, typically, a tagline would go. Just as Crouch Climb Conquer Comfortably was placed in the first commercial I saw.

I can only assume that, for every spot they’ve produced featuring one of their clothing lines, they have a different set of benefits functioning as a tagline of sorts.

While I wish a brand as creative and fun as this one would have included a real, overarching tagline that would apply to everything they make, I must recognize that their approach to the tagline—customizing a tagline for each clothing line, but using the same structure—is not without merit. After all, here I am writing about it.

It is because I almost always find drug advertising, be it prescription or over the counter, to be abhorent, that I must point acknowledge the TV campaign for Osteo-BiFlex, which I guess is an anti-arthritic of sorts, supposed to relieve joint pain. Rather than the typical shots of seniors dancing in a contrived fashion, smiling, laughing, all that baloney,the Osteo-BiFlex found a fresh take on this with some vintage footage of real people dancing circa 1940, give or take a decade. On top of that, they found a very fetching old song from that era, the hook of which is “The joint is jumping”. And the campaign tops it all off with a very nicely done tagline:

The Best Stuff in The Joint.

Each of these elements does such a nice job of complementing the others. The whole campaign hangs together very comfortably and the spot is dang likeable, as hard as I tried not to like it. The downside: what do they do for an encore. Could be tough to put together another spot that works this well.

As I gaze out the window of the Burger King that is my branch office, the UNFI truck passes by, presumably having just emptied its contents at the nearby Whole Foods.

UNFI is “North America’s leading distributor of natural, organic and specialty products”. Starting with the brand name, this company is a marketing communications mess.

The name, an acronym for United Natural Foods, Inc., is terribly unappetizing, more appropriate to a company that might work with the United Nations on financial matters. ANY of the names of the smaller distributors that this company was built on—Mountain People’s Warehouse, Blooming Prairie, People’s Warehouse, Stow Mills, Albert’s Organics, Northeast Cooperatives, Select Nutrition, Root’s ‘N Fruits or Millbrook Distribution Services—would have been a better choice.

The tagline:  Driven By Nature. A tight little combination of two of THE MOST overused tagline plays on words in tagline history. A tagline beneath contempt.

The mission statement is 43 words long. The vision statement is singularly uninspiring, and as generic and vacuous as I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something.

This is a well-intentioned company unwittingly littering the landscape with its marketing language spill. It’s a big company, and no doubt it works with some run of the mill B To B agency, doing run of the mill work for UNFI.

It’s a shame. There are thousands of businesses like this out there, who know their own business very well, but just can’t seem to get a clue about how to be an effective brand.

I find this disspiriting. Especially because it doesn’t seem like there’s any fixing this mess of bad messaging.

I’m going to take a nap,

In my travels, I witness a ton of small business taglines on billboards and other signage, in magazines and newspapers, and even, as in this particular case, on the periphery of a place mat at a diner.

The Sterling Living Center, located I won’t mention where, has a tagline wrapped in quotation marks, a custom as inexplicable to me today as it has been for the decades I’ve been cognizant of this tagline custom. But that isn’t what made me chuckle.

I’d like to think the humor in the tagline will be self-evident, but that assumption has bitten me in the butt more than once.

Ready?

“We focus on people. Our residents. Their lives. Their health. Their families.”

I have to say, I can’t recall ever seeing a five-part tagline before, so I suppose some sort of congratulations is in order for that.

I spent a little while trying to at least turn this into one sentence, to see if it helps. Here’s where I landed:

We focus on the lives and health of our residents and their families.

“people” seemed redundant with “residents and their families”.

“Lives and health”, while not entirely redundant, overlaps a lot. I would have just gone with “health” because “lives” is oh so even more  broad and vague than “health”. Financial lives? Quality of lives? Lifestyles? Spiritual lives? Just what aspect of their lives do they focus on? I’m guessing it’s the health-related aspect.

Given the nature of focusing, I’d argue that you can’t really focus on both the residents and their families. The may take the family into consideration, or attend to their needs as well, but surely they are actually focused on their residents.

So the tagline really could have read:

Focused on our residents’ health.

or, if you wanted to make it sound a little more holistic-ish:

Focused on our residents’ overall health.

So, that’s a much more manageable tagline. But isn’t it kind of stating what should be a given. If a living center didn’t focus on its residents lives/health, what would they focus on?

Anyway, I had a good chuckle.

It is such a sad commentary on advertising that a current Tide commercial has caused a stir because the wife says to the husband, “You suck at folding” at the end of the commercial. The shock isn’t that the word “suck” was used. The shock is that a commercial actually dipped its toe into the waters of real, current, American conversational English. The wife said something that a wife would ACTUALLY SAY in the real world. That never happens, especially not in a commercial for a mundane product like Tide.

Of course, there will be some small sliver of the population who will be offended or put off by the use of the word “suck”, as if it were a naughty word or something. Who cares?

I applaud the Tide people and their ad agency for having the backbone to produce this commercial. I’m sure it was the topic of much discussion and research. But I feel shame for an industry in which it requires backbone to accomplish what should be a given: putting normal, everyday, real world words into the mouths of the people who represent your target audience in your advertising.

I just watched a commercial for the Honda Civic in which the announcer utters the words, “turn sharper”, which should mean you would be in more danger of getting cut by the Civic if it turned sharper. But, in fact, he meant “turn more sharply”. “Sharply” is an adverb. “Sharper” is an adjective.

It wasn’t that long ago that this error would have been caught and fixed by the creative director, or the account guy, or, if everyone else failed, the proofreader. So, is it that Honda’s ad agency doesn’t have a proofreader. These days, that is a very likely possibility. And since, apparently, no one else is familiar with even the most basic basics of grammar, like the difference between an adverb and an adjective, if the proofreader, who no longer works there, doesn’t catch the error, no one else will. Does the client, Honda, have no professional pride? How did they let this one get past them?

I have never considered myself a school marm grammar nazi. I make the purists mad all the time with my liberal point of view about the fluidity and changeability of language.

Granted that some alleged grammarians would allow this use of “sharper” as a comparative adverb in “casual situations”, I’m sorry. Even if the announcer is going for a “casual” or “conversational” tone, in this case, it sounds wrong. Although, obviously, not to the people who produced this commercial.

I’m sorry, call me an old lady, but it’s inexcusable. I am personally embarrassed for every person associated with this commercial.

And that’s saying something. Of course, I’m speaking of the advertising, not the game, which wasn’t too bad, for a change.

I’m going to limit my comments to the commercial’s taglines, as you might expect.

First, I don’t pay attention to ads for movies, TV shows and the NFL since ads for these products are just too easy to create advertising for.

Second, approximately 20% of the commercials during the 2013 Superbowl had no tagline.

Of the commercials that did have taglines, more than half were taglines of three words or less. If I haven’t mentioned it before, and I’m sure I have, really short taglines like these are unlikely to be capable of making an impression, evoking a reaction or communicating a message of any depth.

Just consider the power of the following taglines: Make it great; Smarter. Bolder. Faster; Truth in engineering; Open happiness; Let’s go places; Here we go; Eat fresh; Live Mas; Designed for speed; Handle it. These are what pass for taglines in the modern age. The fact is, large brands, by and large, have abandoned the tagline, as witness these witless excuses for a tagline.

To the extent that anyone is still making an attempt to use taglines effectively, it is small and medium-sized companies that are doing this. Even the Superbowl advertising demonstrates this reality. There were two taglines that made some attempt to be interesting, noticeable or even slightly memorable.

The Gildan shirt company’s tagline is Every Thread Counts. And Redd’s Apple Ale features the tagline Branch Out. At least we haven’t heard this language a zillion times in taglines. At least the tagline has something to do with their products.

I (begrudgingly) acknowledge that Jimmy John’s Freaky Fast Delivery isn’t a bad tagline. It’s clear, it’s about the benefit they’re trying to focus on, and it’s kind of fun.

But that’s about it. There’s just nothing much else to say about the taglines that we saw during this year’s Superbowl.

Perhaps the pendulum will swing back some day. But for the forseeable future, for those of us who still value the contribution that taglines make, it will be small businesses and some medium-sized businesses that we will be looking to.

There’s no inherent limitation in large businesses that prevents them from coming up with good taglines. In fact, there are hundreds of examples of wonderful taglines for many large businesses. It’s just that almost all of them are examples drawn from the archives of advertising during the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s, (and maybe the 50’s and 90’s) when taglines were appropriately valued.

Welcome to the Dark Age of taglines.