Tag that Market – Branding with taglines

A tagline is a short set of words that companies use to associate with their company or brand. A tagline is an important part of branding. It can be your best brand communication tool, if done right.

What Taglines Do

Good taglines perform three important functions for a brand

1. They cut through marketing clutter and communicate your brand promise in a sticky, memorable way.
2. They are an accountability tool in that they remind you of your own brand promise.
3. They are the customers’ indicator of a future experience.

Today taglines have become a successful way by which companies are easily grabbing the attention of these target customers (prospects as they’re commonly known!). Nike’s Just do it has created wonders for the company not only in terms of the revenue that it has exponentially generated but it has also successfully increased itsbrand equity.

Similarly, there is Wii would like to play by Nintendo Wii. A beautiful tagline that is simple to memorize; a statement which is used by children on a daily basis (only with a different meaning to it now!)

To think of it, taglines have now become a part of our conversations, be it the “Surf Excel Hai Na!”, or the famous “ I love you Rasna” ( one tagline that was famous even after the commercial went off air).

Basically what Marketers are doing here is that they are trying to make the product not only available, but also drilling the USP of the product ( take the example of MRF – Tyres with Muscle) in the customers mind.

Then again, there are Taglines are an effective tool for a healthy rivalry between competitors. For instance, when The Hindu was launched, in order for it to combat and also capture the strong market of the Times group, it simply launched itself with the tagline “Stay ahead of the Times”. A strategy that helped the company rope in quite a good amount of readers who were loyal towards other newspapers.

Tagline Marketing (the rivalry, competition and market share) is more evident in automobiles. Here companies use innovative taglines as an attempt to capture the potential market. Take the case of the latest Honda Brio – It loves you back! Or Mahindra Scorpio – Nothing Else will do or even Maruti SX4  – Men are back. Companies use Taglines as a positioning tool. With the help of taglines, companies are expressing the customer’s needs (which they may not be able to put in words) via taglines.

Thus by capturing the thoughts of customers (needs/wants/desires/expectations) and portraying it as a feature or attribute of your product or service is the crux of Tagline Marketing.

Tagline form of marketing has become evident and successful in capturing a particular targeted share of the market. For instance in mobile phones it is easily noticeable when the youth carry a particular type of handset as compared to the working professionals (we will usually find the difference even between different genders) . The latest Samsung Galaxy S3 talks about being “Designed for Humans” , ultimately talking about itself as a MUST HAVE product amongst the tech savvy sect of consumers.

To conclude, the art of tagline development is to distill the meaning of a big idea into a cogent message that’s easy to say, easy to understand, and easy to remember. A good tagline is one which is crisp, understandable, talks about the product and very easy to remember and recollect. Once a brand is ready with a good tagline and a marketing strategy, it’s all ready to TAG THAT MARKET !!!!