Taglines, because you are an idiot
The humble tagline both attracts and repels me. As with a magnet, this effect largely depends upon which way it is pointed but one way to guarantee my dismay is to use then unnecessarily.
So whilst I am happy to learn that BA is “the world’s favourite airline” I am less interested to know that the people behind the East- West water pipe infrastructure are “keeping the water flowing”.
The former tagline grants me some kind of confidence as I choose which airline to fly with whereas the latter tells me nothing I didn’t know already and serves little purpose neither educationally or commercially.
It is as though the words leaked out from a meeting intent upon marketing its service in a ‘commercial’ manner.
The same goes for the BBC election broadcasts. Maybe I ought to be glad they are “making it clear” because all the other channels are “pulling the wool over your eyes since 1882″. The clarity of a tagline brings everything into sharp focus.
Public bodies, in their confusing remit to offer choice, seem to suffer more than most from the scourge of the pointless tagline.
Everywhere I turn I learn new and interesting facts.
Did you know (I didn’t and almost to my fatal cost) that the NHS is “safe, clean, personal”? I should hope it is but saying it doesn’t necessarily make it so. I don’t need the glib sales talk. It does nothing to make me feel better.
And then there are the taglines that don’t even give you any sort of clue why they were written. Travelling behind a van for a company called Fantasy Bathrooms I wondered at their tagline, “Why Compromise?” I can think of lots of reasons to compromise really. It actually seems like a good skill to learn. So what were they trying to say? Was it that their bathrooms were top quality and expensive, imitation brands at a low cost, very cheap and poor quality? What?
It’s such a general line that it evaporates into nothing. Much like Smirnoff vodka who also make use of it which just shows how interchangeable it is.
It is as though creatives or marketeers have a tool in their kit which they simply must deploy despite being unsure of how to use it. Perhaps these lines were trotted out as a way of selling in key creative which might be fine in the context of a presentation but less so when released into a population of people who aren’t fired up by the possibilities of sales talk.
I recently saw a cleaning service with the tagline ”Fluent In Effluent”. Never has being told too much told me so little.
That’s one of Marketing’s dirty little tricks as ever I heard… Today I saw another tagline for a highways company who told us they were ‘working with you to improve the highways’ which just made worry that some national service was being implemented.