26 Nov 2004 | Paul Randall said...

Years ago when I worked for the Tampa Tribune, their tag was "Making a Difference in Your Community," which has a nice ring to it until some wise-acre like me comes along and says, "yea, but so does crack cocaine."

My point being that 'nice ring' is all it has going for it and it is otherwise vaccuous tripe. But marketing is the business of leading people towards fuzzy, comfortable, and non-specific conclusions about products. So 'nice ring' is good enough in that context, I guess. Fortunately for them, most people are not OCD nit-pickers like me.

26 Nov 2004 | tiffany said...

Taglines aren't bad. Companies just have bad taglines.

37Signals, for example, is a cool company name, but it doesn't exactly say what you do. Do you sell radios? Are you a semaphore company? Do you send telegrams in Morse code?

A good tagline might be "Websites made simple." Pithy. To the point. Sums up your design and (hopefully your) client relations strategies in three words.

That's why taglines -- good, well thought out taglines -- are important branding tools.

26 Nov 2004 | beto said...

I can see Fortune 500 bigwigs getting by without using taglines - they don't need them. They already have a marketing army that does the job. But when you are a hole-in-the-wall, mom-and-pop shop, struggling to get work at the door and for getting known in the business (specially when all your company name gets in response is "Who?") then you do need a tagline that summarizes what you do for your clients, until the day you can afford to be as instantly recognizable as Coke or "The swoosh company formerly known as Nike"

Ours, for instance, is "productive internet" and even though most of our work is web-based, I don't really feel it fits our company perfectly, since we're rather more on the same bandwagon as 37S and UX consulting companies. We should review that over time.

Gotta love that "websites made simple" tag. Just. Perfect. :D

26 Nov 2004 | Brad Hurley said...

I hope this is a sign that the "branding" craze is starting to fade away. Lots of companies (including the one I work for) have spent ridiculous amounts of money on developing taglines. This might have made some sense in the 1980s, but today if you have a decent website you can have a totally inscruitable company name like 37signals or RogueAmoeba and not need a tagline because anyone who wants to find out what you do can just go to your site.

Taglines can be bad if they're too limiting (unless you're a company with a very limited mission or product). And if they're not too limiting they're usually too generic or too lame. Although I guess some can be memorable: "All the News That's Fit to Print" (or is it "All the News That Fits, We Print"?).

26 Nov 2004 | Jason Gaidmore said...

Taglines are so 1990.

27 Nov 2004 | Davezilla said...

While I agree with the previous commenters regarding taglines that have little to do with the product just adding to the muck and confusion, the web has thrown us some ill-fitting company names over the years that we've readily accepted (Amazon, eBay, Monster). Do these names describe the product they sell? Hardly.

It's true that taglines can be a waste, but done properly, they can contribute greatly to SEO efforts. I've experimented with quite a few over the past ten years on my site and they drag in quite a few more visitors. I've had the phrase, "tomfoolery and monkeyshines" pretty well locked up for the past five years and couldn't be happier. ;^)

29 Nov 2004 | Dustin said...

At first when I saw "tag lines," we usually referred to that as the "text underneath your headline" in journalism classes.

However since most blogging softwares don't take into account a tagline (or otherwise known as a subhead), nobody is doing it.

I always figured having a subhead would be nice so we could have the pleasure of writing catchy headlines all while retaining SEO.

There's a reason bloggers (or bloggers who know what they're doing) fair so much better (on SE's) than online publications of print newspapers.

What I mean is newspaper columnists will usually write something like "Gee Dub is doing some house cleaning," rather than what they really mean "George Bush is declaring war on Iraq."

In this case, having a subhead would be really nice so you could write in one instance (the headline) your catch phrase, and then your subhead -> what you really mean.

Sorry if this was offtopic, but I thought it was appropriate since you mentioned "tagline" and I discustingly turned it into "subhead."

To get back on topic, I don't think any place really needs a tagline, although it would be nice to have an official purpose...sentence...phrase or what have you. It doesn't needed to be branded like most companies think they need to do...but having one is good.

Because of course as we all know, it's the content that really matters.

29 Nov 2004 | Mark said...

I think that the smart companies are repurposing the tagline into a brand promise a summary statement of the culture that not only customers can expect to find, but also the vendors and employees. Really smart companies, I believe, are also encouraging employees, through the brand promise, to live the promise in their lives outside the office as well.

13 Dec 2004 | thirstymoose said...

Don't confuse taglines and slogans.

A good tagline will define a site's purpose in a few susinct words.

A slogan is used as part of brand building - ie just do it.

Some brands use their slogan on their web site, but a true "tagline" is more like examples you'd find in Jacob Nielsen's or Steve Krugg's books.