Here’s a great bit of advice from Jakob Nielsen’s 2001 post about writing company taglines:
…look at how you present the company in the main copy on the home page. Rewrite the text to say exactly the opposite. Would any company ever say that? If not, you’re not saying much with your copy, either.
Great copy doesn’t remind people what they already know and expect about your product, it tells them why they should care.
Tim
on 25 Jan 13An example of a good tagline would be very helpful.
Stefan Fidanov
on 25 Jan 13Sounds inspirational, yet I am not convinced. A few examples from your own home pages:
Original: Last week 7,123 companies signed up for Basecamp to manage their projects. Today it’s your turn. Opposite: Last week no companies signed up for Basecamp to manage their projects. Today it is not your turn.
Original: Every person has an email address. Every small group should have one, too. Opposite: No one has an email address. No small group should have one, either.
May be I don’t really understand the quote, but I do think the original taglines from Basecamp and Basecamp Breeze homepages are good and I doubt that anyone would say the opposites.
Romain
on 25 Jan 13Basecamp tagline is: “The World #1 Project Management App”, Breeze’s is “Simple Email List for Small Groups”. Both of which make clear what the product does and what makes it unique.
David Andersen
on 25 Jan 13I think fear is reason #1 that leads most companies to present vague, banal copy about their business. They are afraid of losing business so they try to sound hip and generic. And the end result is they lose business. The second reason is they fail to appreciate the power of words; they think having something – anything – out there is sufficient.
JZ
on 25 Jan 13@Tim – there are a few in the linked article
@Stefan Fidanov – What is interesting to me about this idea is that is applies to copywriting in general, not just taglines. It’s a neat exercise that might help reveal copy that is lacking.
@David Andersen – Totally agree. Some of it is simply cargo-culting. People write copy in a style that sounds like “marketing”, memos that sound like “business”. The result is an obscure message that doesn’t say anything. If you’re interested in that topic, Revising Prose is any excellent guide to the problem with excercises to help you break out of “The Official Style”.
Levi
on 25 Jan 13Best quote from the article:
Johnny
on 25 Jan 13A good way to view your offering as well. Do the same with your feature list to find or create what makes your product/service truly better, not just how you refer to it in a tag line. Fast-slow, easy-difficult. Like tag lines, certain features are baseline expectations. What’s the real differentiator?
Paul
on 26 Jan 13There are two parts to his summary “Two questions can help you assess your own tagline: Would it work just as well for competitors? Would any company ever claim the opposite?”
I don’t think the one you highlighted is actually as useful as the other one.
“would any company ever claim the opposite” discounts just about anything positive you might want to say about your company.
I think “would it work just as well for competitors?” is the more useful question. That’s the one that’s going to give you a position in the market. And sure, that position must still be something your customers really value.
Nik
on 28 Jan 13Almost metaphorically, this approach reminds me somehow of what many matte-painters in the visualfx industry etc. do. In order to check the balance of their visuals in terms of composition, lighting etc. they mirror or flip the image a few times while working.
Anonymous Coward
on 28 Jan 13Nielsen originally presented this as advice for writing “About Us” pages. It’s pretty useful for that sort of thing but, as Stefan points out, can quickly become irrelevant when you’re looking at writing that is inherently detail-rich, such as product-description copy and marketing-oriented stats (” last week 7,123 companies signed up for Basecamp”).
Nielsen’s point is simply this: When you sit down to describe your company, do your best to describe your company, not any old company.
This discussion is closed.