When I was in Korea a few years back, adiposity I was struck that even in cities where very few people spoke English, find “upscale” stores always had an English tagline under an English name. But the words didn’t seem to matter: most were incomprehensible, cialis 40mg vague, or with uninteded double entendres (as below). Weirdly, these businesses seemed to have taglines simply for the sake of filling space under their name with letters, not because anyone would get information from them. You know what’s even weirder? It happens here too.
For this Korean tag line, you can at least tell what they were going for. But are they really offering both those services?
A global plague:
Lest we seem to be picking on obscure stores in non-English speaking countries, a couple of weeks ago, we pointed out this tagline from a local real estate agent – and we could have chosen many more from that industry alone.
And size of company doesn’t seem to matter. Check out this bit of tagline vapidity from a major international brand – spotted in July 2009. “Sychronizing the world of commerce” is actually less meaningful than “Fitting & Feeling” – and I imagine UPS has a few more people working on their materials than Teman.
Another space-filler tagline - UPS fails to deliver.
Say something nice… or say nothing at all
Another uncomfortable tagline from a Korean store - but it just looks right to have one doesn't it?
Or rather, just say something useful.
Like every other aspect of your brand, a tag line is supposed to be a tool to help people understand something about your brand – some aspect of your service that will help them make a purchase decision in your favour.
A good tag line needs to inform me or help me differentiate you from your competitors; maybe it will make a leadership claim or offer me a guarantee; at the very least it should give me a clever “hook” to remenber you by; otherwise it’s just filling a space.
Here’s a secret that should never have to be spoken: a tag line isn’t a design element. It’s actually a set of words that happen to be occupying prime real estate on your sign, page, or Web site. So make sure they “pay their rent” by actually doing useful things.
At Brandvelope, we have a whole set of tools to help clients develop really useful tag lines. But without getting too deeply into that topic in this post, just remember that at the very least, make sure it’s helping somebody.
Tomorrow: 25 useless taglines from brands that should know better.
Last week there was widespread (and agency-fuelled) speculation about the meaning of the mysterious “230” campaign. AdAge managed to uncover that the source was General Motors, diagnosis but not much beyond that. Well, this morning Twitter is abuzz with the answer: 230 is the EPA-verified mileage per gallon for the new Chevy Volt. (Translation for the rest of civilization: that’s old fashioned for “97.78 kilometers per litre“). S0 5000 km (3107 miles) on a 50 litre tank? Not so fast…
The mystery campaign featured this graphic. The clues are all there (but no GM /; Chevy branding) Green + Electric + MPG + announcement date (today)
Interesting Brand Strategy and positioning notes:
GM 2.0. Of course, this is a huge stake in the sand to demonstrate to the public that GM is plugged in, tuned in to the green energy karma, and turning a big corner (does the 11 stand for “Chapter?). The Chevrolet brand seems to be the flag bearer for this, although the VOLT is being branded as a stand-alone portfolio brand. But is this just a smoke screen to mask deeper problems at America’s favourite Welfare recipient? Many think so.
Big splash for a rock that hasn’t hit the water yet. This is a clever way for GM to build hype for a very expensive little car that won’t hit showrooms until November next year – possibly much later. 230 mpg is a clever hook to attach to the Volt, and a tough claim for competitors to beat – for now. But will it live up to the claim? That’s the big question. 230 sounds great, but if the public gets turned off by the fuzzy dice being used in the numbers, this could blow up in their face.
Note the *slightly* evasive language (“tentative” “draft” “expects”) around what 230 actually means, as GM says that the mileage is based on “draft EPA federal fuel economy methodology for labeling for plug-in electric vehicles”. Which means that they’re weighting the new standards to shorter trips with frequent plug-ins and more city driving. So no, you can’t drive across the country on a single tank. I’ve seen apples-to-apples estimates of 100+ mpg using the old system. Not as much “wow”, but easier to back up – and less likely to create backlash.
The car is being categorized as an “extended-range electric vehicle” using “flex-fuel” which are interesting plain language descriptors – when the acronym “EREV” and the term “E-Flex” that have been used to label both concepts from early in the development process. One wonders if the GM team is developing more trademarkable proprietary terms that will be unveiled closer to launch.
More information
Chevrolet boilerplate – note the heavy “green-washing” of the language
Chevrolet is one of America ‘s best-known and best-selling automotive brands, and one of the fastest growing brands in the world. With fuel solutions that go from “gas-friendly to gas-free,” Chevy has nine models that get 30 miles per gallon or more on the highway, and offers three hybrid models. More than 2.5 million Chevrolets that run on E85 biofuel have been sold. Chevy delivers expressive design, spirited performance and provides the best value in every segment in which it competes.
The just-announced tag for a late summer advertising campaign – wait for it:
“Toronto never smelled so good.”
The original article I saw on this is quoted here:
Toronto Star article: The whiff of opportunity for Tourism Toronto: When you attract attention for all the wrong reasons, you might as well try to play it for a laugh. That’s the thinking behind a new promotion launched today by Tourism Toronto with the slogan “Toronto never smelled so good.”
Now, to me, this looked like a “fresh” approach to a thorny problem: how to put a positive and even humourous spin on a negative situation. So I gave them the benefit of ther doubt, and whatever the ramifications, I have to admire the guts of the Toronto Tourism folks:
Metro: Slogan smells ‘so good’“We’re going to take the strike head-on, and use it as an opportunity to invite people back,” Weir said. “It’s been top of the newscasts for the last 40 days. The best thing we can do is let them know the experience here is as high-quality and exciting as it’s ever been — and now there’s no garbage piled up.”
– Andrew Weir, vice-president of Tourism Toronto
But in coverage on CBC radio in Ottawa last night, our drive-home host Adrian Harewood talked about the slogan, and spent several minutes of air time chatting with newsman Lawrence Wall about it. The focus of the conversation: Is it true?
Apparently, many Toronto parks and public spaces still smell fairly pungent after being used as dumps. Reaction from some Torontonians has been even more pointed:
24 Hours: Does Toronto smell good to you? Toronto never smelled so good. Really? You sure about that? Pretty certain it stank like rotting landfill on my way in to work yesterday.
Like an old horn-dog perched at a local watering hole ogling young waitresses, the post-strike branding has the distinct smell of desperation, which is as off-putting as bad breath, really.
So while it’s an attention-getting (and brave) approach, the problem with this slogan is not that it isn’t effective: 1) it’s not true; 2) it can be seen as making light of a serious and divisive issue in the city, and 3) raises questions that actually focus more attention on something that tourists don’t want to think about.
Should be interesting to see the reaction as this unfolds.
This morning’s Twitter outage, symptoms is only one of the many problems facing brand Twittter. Back in June, order early in my Twitter career (yes, the Twitterverse is turning quickly my friends) I blogged about this – No Twitter Brand, what are YOU doing? But now that I’ve had time to think about this some more (thanks for the outage Twitter!), I’ve got some more thoughts – all of which require more than 140 characters.
Aquatic superstar rising (falling?)... Just one of the great fanart images at www.failwhale.com.
Over the next week or two, I’ll deal with 3 major brand credibility problems Twitter is facing, followed by a set of solutions I’ll modestly put forward.
The Jumping the Failwhale series: Twitter’s biggest problems
Problem 1: Brand Promise: (in this post – see below) the free ride will have to end, and the real owners of the Twitter brand will not be pleased.
Problem 2: Brand Character:(coming soon) Twitter feels more “Social” and less like serious “Media”. Basically, the boss ain’t buying it, and unless something changes, he may be right.
Problem 3: Brand Personality:(coming soon)Despite the fresh, breezy cartoon-graphics, the kids aren’t twittering. Twitter is fast becoming an old people’s brand and the problem is hard-wired into the product.
Solutions:(coming soon) My 10 Recommendations to save Twitter.
Problem 1: Brand Promise. The free ride will end.
A Brand Promise is the implicit set of expectations a brand builds up in the mind of its customers over time. And just like a real-world promise, the owner of the promise (and indeed the brand itself) is the person to whom the promise is made: the customer.
The promise of Twitter
Twitter users have come to value, and expect, afree, open online community accessible to all with 1) an Internet connection and 2) enough time to cultivate a Twitter brand of your own.
The problem with this is that of course, the party can’t go on like this forever. There are real world implications to the scale of Twitter’s success. Yup, I mean big crashes like this morning. But more to the point: money / revenue / filthy lucre / a basic business model. This is of course a no-brainer, because it’s a problem with all Social Media. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, and a thousand other online communities and services have built their huge audiences fast on the same implicit promise.
Try it, use it forever, and pay nothing – with no ads – all of these are very attractive hooks to get people in. But having set those expectations in customers’ minds, no one should be surprised if they feel betrayed if you suddenly try to “monetize” their “eyeballs”. Oh, they’ll understand. But this isn’t about rational thought; it’s about a broken promise.
I can hear the objection: “but we never said it would be free forever”. Doesn’t matter. Your actions led them to expect it would be free forever, which in their mind is the same thing.
A summer-friendly analogy
Imagine that one day I mow my neighbour’s lawn, then laugh off any payment he might offer by saying “that’s what neighbours do”. Don’t you think it would make him happy and strengthen our neighbourly bond? Probably. As long as he didn’t suspect my motives.
Which leads me to the following week, when I tell him “I’ve decided that the price of gas being what it is, you either have to pay me a dollar to do it again, or listen to a 5 minute pitch for my business.”
He’ll understand. He might even recognize that it’s a really good deal I’m offering. But do you think he’d be happy about it?
An example from my practice
We dealt with this issue last year while I was acting Vice President of Marketing at CoursePark.com – an online learning management network. We played around with a number of options, from totally free access (like Facebook or Twitter), to pay-per-use, or just a low-cost subscription. Our solution in the end: give users a free-forever option, but a) be very clear what the limits were, b) set clear prices on the commercial e-learning content we sold through our library, c) give them an expanded range of capabilities for free in exchange for sharing their content with the rest of CoursePark, and d) make it easy and transparent to allow them to upgrade to the “enterprise” version for larger programs / more support / more member controls.
The bottom line
Be careful what you promise (even implicitly); your customers will hold you too it.
If you’re building a business, people are cool with that – if they know your motives in advance.
If you have built expectations that you can’t sustain, don’t assume that you can change the rules at will. You will pay for it.
Differentiation is good. Very very good. I made the point in my post about the Ottawa Shawarma scene that in a crowded, site undifferentiated marketplace, for sale finding a catchy gimmick is a great way to get people to remember you. This unfortunately is the other side of the “personal branding” coin.
Yes, cheap I noticed it. Yes, I remembered it. But no, I’m not going to buy a house from you my Scottish friend.
A good tag line should do at leat one of the following a) tell me what you do if I don’t already know, b) tell me how you do your thing better than anyone else, and / or c) make an emotional connection to show me how “sympatico” you are with me – how you think like I do about your subject area.
This one does none of those things.
5 Reasons this tag line won’t get me to hire the guy in the kilt:
1) It doesn’t tell me what you do for me. The tag line doesn’t tell me anything about your business – and mine. How well / differently do you do what you want me to hire you to do: buy or sell property? Kilt does not equal real estate excellence in my mind. Sorry.
2) It’s all about you. There are perhaps a few large egos in the Real Estate business, and this one makes me suspect you might be among them. If you’re not, show me that by not focusing your ad entirely on yourself. If you are, just save your money and commission a statue of yourself in your back yard. Maybe a little shrine.
3) I don’t want to see you in a kilt. I would be incredibly uncomfortable meeting you in person – especially if you were actually wearing a kilt. Don’t get me wrong, a kilt can be very classy at a wedding or a military Tattoo. But it’s an eccentric thing – kind of like telling people you are a closet Klingon speaker or always wear socks with fish on them. You’ll get remembered, but it doesn’t build your brand.
4) There is such a thing as bad publicity / attention / memorable-ness. While I was taking this picture, a random passer-by laughed out loud at the ad. And not in a “ha ha that’s so clever I want to by a house from him” kind of way. Enough said.
5) My wife is a MacDonald. Apparently there’s some kind of ancient blood feud. Something about your ancestors murdering a bunch of her ancestors in their sleep. Sorry. Nothing personal. But you did bring up the ethnic thing.
Big splash for a rock that hasn’t hit the water yet. This is a clever way for GM to build hype for a very expensive little car that won’t hit showrooms until November next year – 
