I pay a lot of attention to the sides of trucks. It’s part of my job description. Some trucks carry only the name of the company that owns the truck. Or just the name and contact information. More common are trucks that display a descriptor of what kind of business it is, or a list of the types of things the business does or sells.

These trucks are of no interest to me. The companies that own these trucks don’t understand, much less value, their own brand. As a result they have little or no brand.

My interest, surprise surprise, lies in those company trucks that also feature the company’s tagline. I use the presence or absence of a tagline as a measure of how smart a company it is.

Yesterday I spotted a van belonging to Drip Drop Plumbing, a small business located in Naperville, Illinois. I don’t live in that vicinity, so I’d never heard of them.

Their tagline, proudly displayed on the truck: Finally, a plumbing company with a reasonable price. Never mind that this line was in quotes with an exclamation point at the end, two cardinal sins in tagline land. Despite these tagcrimes, I was tempted to get out of my car and go shake the driver’s hand.

Not because this is a great tagline. It’s not. But, at least, they have the insight and the guts to make their brand stand for something. They’ve chosen a value positioning for their brand, which, I’d guess, serves them well, given the common perception that plumbers are pricey. More important, they couched their tagline in the language of the customer, looking at it from the customer’s point of view. This tagline could be the thought bubble above the head of a customer who was just handed the bill from Drip Drop assuming that their prices really are reasonable, but that’s a whole different discussion.)

I don’t have a regular plumber. If I need a plumber, I’m probably going to do a search, or maybe consult Angie’s List or some local publication that rates local businesses. Or ask a neighbor. I may not choose to go with Drip Drop. But, because I saw the tagline and now understand that they at least claim to have reasonable prices, their name is on my considered set of possible plumbers. Without the tagline, this company still doesn’t exist in my world.

Not everyone thinks like I think. Not everyone will be affected by this tagline. But what if 5% of the people who glimpse this tagline on the side of their truck make a mental note, maybe not even consciously, of Drip Drop. That’s a lot of people. And what if, say, five of those people, over the course of a year, wind up using Drip Drop as a result of having noticed and liked the message the tagline conveys. And what if they then have a good experience with Drip Drop, and recommend them to a friend or neighbor or two. This is how a brand grows, in a way that a business without any brand to speak of, never will.

Prudential. The Rock You Can Rely On. This is the tagline, spoken, not seen, at the end of the latest Prudential commercials. So here we have an insurance company, indelibly associated with its iconic logo featuring the Rock of Gibraltar,  a rock which has stood for stability for centuries, and the logo, for decades. Yet it seems the Prudential folks feel they still need to carry a tagline that spells out, hits us over the head, with the symbolism, to make absolutely sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Prudential brand is all about reliability, stability, dependability. The Rock You Can Rely On. As opposed to some rock that isn’t so reliable? Like maybe a hoodoo? Is Prudential to be congratulated for never wavering from its position, its brand? Or are they to be scolded for failing to build on, or evolve, the meaning of their brand beyond this standard stability story, which has been theirs forever, but not theirs alone, as pretty much every insurance company lays claim to this same attribute? I’m inclined to the latter. What’s your call?

Overstock.com. Expectently Low Prices.

When I saw this on TV yesterday, I had to back up my DVR and freeze on the tagline at the end of their commercial to be sure I was reading it correctly. Ending the tagline with “Low Prices” is not surprising, given the nature of the website, but those two words are so often used that they ring flat and empty. WalMart’s Always Low Prices sort of ruined it for anyone else who wants to tout low prices.

But Expectently Low Prices? Did they misspell the word on purpose to draw you in and make you take a second look. If so, it worked for me. On the other hand, it makes them look stupid because, either it’s intentionally misspelled, in which case it’s a cheap, manipulative trick. Or else they somehow didn’t catch it, which is almost impossible to imagine. If it’s a mistake, wow do they look stupid.

Setting aside the misspelling issue, the word is an adverb being used as an adjective. I can’t quite figure what they intended to mean. Do they mean to say “The low prices you’ve come to expect at Overstock.com”? Or do they mean “Unexpectedly Low Prices.”? Or are the low prices themselves eagerly awaiting something?

PLEASE, somebody involved with the making of this campaign, help me out here. What am I missing? Is there a joke in there somewhere that I’m too addled to get? Is the line pregnant with meaning? Is it possible that this tagline is as big of a mess as it seems to me? Help me.

Fiber One’s new tagline is Cardboard no. Delicious yes.

I applaud General Mills for their courage in acknowledging the common perception that high fiber cereals taste like cardboard. Believe it or not, that took guts on the part of some brand manager. Unless I miss my guess, somebody at the ad agency—writer, creative director, or, if this were the old days, account guy—had to fight like crazy for this word, and the idea it articulates.

The tagline stands apart and is getting noticed because of its forthrightness, and because the word “cardboard” is not part of the standard lexicon of consumer goods taglines.

(I do wonder how there can be this common perception that high fiber cereal tastes like cardboard when almost no one who carries this perception has actually tasted cardboard. We may be doing cardboard a disservice.)

I do have two issues with Fiber One’s tagline. First, the punctuation police officer in me would argue that it should read

Cardboard, no. Delicious, yes.

Once again, the art director won this argument. “Commas are so clunky. Yuck.”

I wish some graduate student would do their doctoral thesis on the impact of art directors and designers on grammar, syntax and punctuation in American English. Are they responsible for the death of adverbs (Do we really need that “-ly” at the end of quick? It would be so much cleaner without it.), for example?

My second issue is with the word “delicious.” Unlike cardboard, this word is not only part of the standard lexicon of consumer product taglines. It is THE MOST worn out word in the sub lexicon of words used to describe stuff we eat.

So I give the agency and the client an A for courage, and a D for execution.

As you watch the marketing world grappling with our ever-morphing digital reality, you may feel like you’ve lost whatever tenuous understanding you may have had about how to prioritize your marketing dollars. Apparently, traditional media have become dinosaurs, and the holy grail, which a few years ago was banner ads and email blasts, has become social media. Meanwhile, you’re just trying to figure out how to keep your current customers engaged and attract some new ones somehow. You’ve got a website, but it feels invisible.

What to do, what to do?  I can’t begin to answer most of these big picture questions. But I can suggest one simple, understandable, doable thing that is impervious to digital obsolesence. In fact, this thing, while not itself inherently digital, increases in value and becomes more indispensible as the world becomes more and more digital.

What is this thing? Well, given that this is Tagline Jim talking here, you may have already guessed that the answer is . . . umm . . . your tagline. Or rather, a really good tagline to replace your current tagline.

Just think about it for a minute. What’s the overall communication trend in digital land? Your communications with current and prospective customers need to be shorter, quicker, more condensed, more agile, more adaptable, more able to evoke an emotion or action in fewer words, a shorter time, a smaller space. Bytes, not blather.

Print ads, brochures and direct mail pieces are often reduced to emails and banner ads, then texts and tweets. It’s the incredible shrinking message.

So guess what form your most condensed, concise, potent and “media infinite” brand message takes: why, it’s your tagline. The smaller your opportunity is to connect, the bigger the role your tagline takes on.

While the rest of the world tries to grasp the value of viral marketing, textvertising, appvertising, tweetvertising and the like, your potential customers simply need to grasp your brand. So give them a “brand handle.” Give them a good, engaging, differentiating tagline and you’ve taken one tangible, step toward communicating your brand in this brave new digital world.

No one is suggesting that creating a good tagline constitutes a marketing plan. Obviously, there need to be other tools in your marketing drawer. Which tools those are will depend largely on the nature of your business.

Regardless of the business you’re in, however, a tagline is not a bad place to start when building a catalogue of brand communications. Once you’ve acquired a tagline that works well for you, one of the next tools many businesses shift their focus to is the infamous “elevator  speech.”

This is that brief, concise, but longer-than-a-tagline explanation of just what your business is about. It’s the little speech you want to have at the ready in any environment where networking is possible, and certainly, if you’re actively prospecting. Could be a party, a conference or trade show, or just on the street.

The tagline, printed on your business card or brochure, for instance, can trigger the opportunity to start a conversation with your the elevator speech. From that point on, extending the conversation will depend on how interesting your elevator speech is.

Whether the tagline succeeds in starting a conversation, of course, depends on just how engaging and/or intriguing it is. If your tagline is “Discover The Power Of Quality Solutions.”, your prospect is likely to nod off half way through reading it.

But if your line is less expected, somewhat original or refreshing, funy, curious or provocative, it won’t just create an opportunity to get to your elevator speech, it may evoke a reaction that opens the door to other stories about your brand, i.e., how you got to that tagline, how your company began, other people’s reaction to the tagline, how the tagline is indicative of your company’s culture or mission, etc.

Archie McPhee is a novelty company whose tagline declares that it is Slightly Less Disappointing Than Other Companies. Granted that, being a novelty company, they have more license to carry a funny tagline, the line speaks volumes about what kind of company they are and, presumably, what it’s like to deal with them. The empathetic forthrightness of the line can be very appealing, and predispose a potential customer to like the company even before experiencing a transaction. And the ripple effects can extend beyond that. That good initial feeling might color the customer’s perception of their transaction, and even start the transaction off on a more positive note.

Not every company can have a tagline that will have this kind of impact. But one thing is certain. Every company with a flat, blah, straightforward, clichéd, ordinary tagline denies themselves a key, early opportunity to set their brand’s tone, allude to their differessence, start a conversation. Can you afford to ignore this opportunity?