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.