Two recent articles – an opinion piece in AdWeek and a post on a small business marketing blog – got me thinking about taglines. More later about the Zavee tagline (Simple. Local. Social.), but first some thoughts about taglines from a strategic perspective.

Taglines act as a shorthand for communication about a business and its products (or a product). There is only so much a tagline can do without smart strategic thinking and powerful creative execution around it. And, of course, it has to be true to the product and the brand. BMW‘s “Ultimate driving machine” tagline has retained its power for 35 years not just because it promises exactly the experience that its buyers want, but because the company and its products deliver.

35 years and counting

I think of taglines as existing on a spectrum between purely product-oriented messages and purely brand-oriented messages. Messages about your product involve what it does and the benefits it provides. Think of Miller Lite‘s “Tastes great, less filling.” Messages about your brand involve what your company is and what it stands for. IBM’s “Building a smarter planet” is mostly if not entirely about the brand; if you weren’t familiar with the company you couldn’t tell what IBM actually does. Snapple‘s tagline, “Made from the best stuff on Earth”, combines a message about the product with a message about Snapple’s corporate values. Creating a tagline that is right for your company should involve a careful and candid analysis of how both kinds of messages fit into your overall consumer value proposition.

Two things to bear in mind when thinking about taglines are positioning within your space and differentiation vs. similarly positioned competitors. Positioning is about the different high-level choices that you make about how you want consumers see your business. The matrix of choices is different in every category and every business in the category occupies a unique point on this matrix – even when there are only limited functional differences among different companies’ products. In fact, the fewer the differences between competing products, the more important positioning can become. Car insurance is a prime example. At one end of the spectrum there are value-positioned companies like Geico with product-focused taglines (“15 minutes can save you 15% or more …”) and at the other there are premium-positioned companies like Allstate whose messages evoke more of a brand than a product promise (“Are you in good hands?”).

However, multiple businesses within a category may position themselves similarly. When this happens, businesses may try to differentiate themselves on the strength of their creative, and the tagline can be part of that. Charles Schwab‘s “Talk to Chuck” campaign is a novel approach to communicating a client-focused positioning. A more strategic approach, however, is to try to find something differentiating in either the brand or the product that had not previously been taken advantage of. A well-known example in the very crowded breakfast cereal category is Wheaties, which used its heritage with athletes to differentiate itself as “The breakfast of champions.”

Small businesses are frequently advised to focus on product benefits when creating a tagline. Is this good advice or is it too limiting? I think all businesses should use the same process: analyze your product and your brand to determine what is credible, compelling and differentiating; understand your positioning choices; and be aware of what your competitors’ messaging is. Consider Avis. Back in the 1960s, Avis was an upstart compared to industry leader Hertz. It couldn’t compete on the basis of its rental fleet, prices, or number of rental locations. Instead, Avis embraced its positioning as a challenger in a way that also communicated a key brand attribute: commitment to customer service. The Avis tagline was an instant classic: “We try harder.”

What about our tagline? Once, when we were asking ourselves what we wanted Zavee to be, someone put three words on the whiteboard: Simple. Local. Social. Ease of use, focus on local communities, and social networking are key features of our platform and we wanted to make sure that everyone at Zavee kept them top of mind. Making those three words our tagline was almost automatic. Why didn’t we focus on brand messages? In one sense, we did: our commitment to helping local communities become stronger is our most important brand attribute. But in another sense, we don’t think open social networks like Zavee really can (or should try to) create a brand other than organically through its members. I don’t see much brand communication from either Facebook or Twitter and I think they have the right approach.

The Zavee takeaway:

• A tagline is only a tagline. It isn’t your entire marketing campaign.
• Understand what sets your product and your brand apart. Understand the same things about your competitors.
• Positioning involves making difficult choices but it’s the only way to truly differentiate yourself. Focus on the differentiators when you are looking for your tagline. It’s in there somewhere.