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

KFC’s new global tagline  is “So good.” Like McDonald’s tag, “I’m Lovin’ It”, this is a generic expression of the reaction the brand hopes it consumers will have to the food, the experience, whatever. Except the KFC line is more vulnerable to mockery. The potential to replace the word “Good” with a less positive word make the line ripe for ridicule. For those who argue that a tagline needs to be unique to, and ownable by, the brand, neither of these tags has merit since either tagline could easily append any brand in any way associated with food, or with many other categories of consumption.

Of course, according to that argument, “Just Do It” also lacks merit since any number of competitors or other active-lifestyle-related brands could have used it.

The thing about taglines is that some great ones are great based mostly on their own merits, while others draw their greatness entirely from the ad campaign that is inspired by, and comes to envelope, that line.

So we must withhold judgment, I suppose, on the new KFC line, until we see just what sort of campaign unfolds. Of course, based on the history of KFC advertising, it would take a stunning departure from their usual stuff to elevate the line above blah.

I’d love to see such a departure. Of course, I’d also love to see the war in Afghanistan resolved next week to the benefit of all involved, and the big oil spill take some miraculous turn for the better.

I try not to take the bait when it comes to “best” lists. I didn’t even glance at the recent Rolling Stone with all their “best songs of all time” lists. But, when it comes to taglines, I’m helpless to resist. So, yes, I looked at the article on Forbes.com. Right off the bat, the article makes a huge mistake by conflating “best-ever” taglines and “best-loved’ taglines. While these may overlap, they are two very different categories. I’m far less interested in what a bunch of industry moguls guess are the best-loved taglines. That list should come from a poll or survey, not from a few bigwigs guessing.

So let’s assume their task was actually to pick the best-ever taglines. And this should be qualified further: best-ever taglines for mostly American Brands.

Here’s their list:

BMW. The Ultimate Driving Machine.

Nike. Just Do It.

American Express. Don’t Leave Home Without It.

Avis. We Try Harder.

California Milk Processor Board. Got Milk?

MasterCard. There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.

Apple. Think Different.

The Few. The Proud. The Marines.

McDonald’s. You Deserve A Break Today.

DeBeers. A Diamond Is Forever.

Miller Lite. Tastes Great. Less Filling.

Verizon Wireless. Can You Hear Me Now?

U.S. Department of Transportation. Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.

Timex. It Takes A Lickin’, But Keeps on Tickin’.

Chevy Trucks. Like A Rock.

Yellow Pages. Let Your Fingers Do The Walking.

Wendy’s. Where’s The Beef?

United Negro College Fund. A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste.

M&Ms. The Milk Chocolate Melts In Your Mouth, Not In Your Hands.

GE. We Bring Good Things To Life.

Hallmark. When You Care Enough To Send The Very Best.

Dunkin’ Donuts. Time To Make The Donuts.

Virginia Slims. You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby.

U. S. Army. Be All You Can Be.

AT&T. Reach Out And Touch Someone.

Three car or car-related brands; four not-for-profits; two telecoms; two credit cards, two beers, two fast food giants, two tech behemoths, a few others.

This list raises an interesting question: Does a great, or simply long-lived ad campaign make its tagline great? For example, Tastes Great. Less Filling. is, to my mind, a terrible tagline. It is simply the benefit statement that was on the creative brief. In no way was it translated into some interesting expression of those benefits. BUT the ad campaign it punctuated was very good, with lots of legs. So, does a stupid tagline become a great tagline by dint of being attached to a good ad campaign?

Here are a few others on the list that I think shouldn’t be:

The M&Ms line. Since I was a kid, I’ve always thought this was one of the sleaziest, most disingenuous lines ever, because, while the milk chocolate doesn’t melt in your hands, all the dye on the candy coating that encapsulates the milk chocolate most assuredly does melt in your hands. So there’s no “chocolatey mess”, but there is never the less a mess. I don’t understand why the M&Ms folks were given a pass on this misleading, false promise, for decades.

The Hallmark line was current at the same time as several other taglines—Bring Out The Hellman’s and Bring Out the Best; Budweiser. Bring Out Your Best, and others that relied on the word “best.” It was something of an adfad at that time, so I take points off for Hallmark jumping on the tagwagon.

Something else strikes me about the lines on this list. I’d say at least half them could easily have been used by competitors in these brands’ respective categories, which further supports my contention that the whole “if your competitor could say it, it’s a bad tagline” argument that creative directors hide behind when they can’t think of any other reason to nix taglines their copywriters propose that the CD just doesn’t like. This is not a flaw in the list above. But it sure is a flaw in the thinking of most ad guys.

That’s all I’ve got.