Business Slogan Secrets
Written on January 17, 2012 by admin
This is a guest post from Scott Hersh of Business Cash Advance.
Clearly define the advantage of your business in a zesty way.
For a minute, I want you to just put aside all of your preconceived notions about business slogans. Not because your preconceived notions aren’t true, they probably are true for one niche or another, but because your preconceived notions are probably not always applicable and therefore seem contradictory.
First, please consider, what these two slogans have in common…
- Wikipedia- “The Free Encyclopedia”
- Nike- “Just Do It”
It would seem that the creators of each of these business slogans play by completely different marketing rules. “The Free Encyclopedia,” includes absolutely no hype, and is a concise explanation of what Wikipedia provides. “Just Do It,” on the other hand, is 100% hype, and not only doesn’t explain anything about what Nike provides, the slogan itself calls for some explanation. Yet both slogans are great, why?
The answer to how both slogans can be polar opposites, and yet be great, gets to the essence of the business slogan. Both Nike and Wikipedia’s slogans inspire a desired action from each of their respective ideal audiences. In other words, for a slogan to be great, it needs to inspire the desired action from your ideal audience or customer.
The ideal audience of Wikipedia is a person who is looking for free information on the internet. Wikipedia has established their brand as the premier source for free information by the use of the word, “The,” before, “Free Encyclopedia.” Such a slogan is enough to inspire trust in the brand and cause people to depend on Wikipedia as the world’s most accessible, and free, information authority.
Nike, on the other hand, has a completely different mission than Wikipedia. Nike is trying to remain the alpha of the athletic shoes market, and, likewise, sell a lot of shoes. Their ideal customers are those who are either athletic or want to feel athletic, and can be convinced to pay a premium for what they perceive they can accomplish by putting just the right product on their feet. By the way, my point is not to belittle Nike shoes in any way, but rather to define, from a marketing perspective, how their slogan is designed to sell products. The power of the marketing slogan, “Just Do It,” is not in the clarity, rather the open-endedness itself is designed to sell the shoes.
What does, “Just Do It,” mean anyway? It is an empowering message aimed to inspire the listener to believe that he or she can or should do that which he or she feels uncertain about doing, but probably, really wants to do. Nonetheless, as long as the phrase remains outside of some semblance of a context, it doesn’t actually mean anything. So the message in, “Just Do It,” is whatever you, the listener, wants it to be, and that’s why it’s so compelling.
As we see from the examples of Wikipedia and Nike, two slogans can do and say very different things, while still being very effective. But the secret commonality between all successful business slogans is the focus on prodding a desired audience to perform a certain action.
At the beginning of this article I requested that you put aside all of your preconceived notions about business slogans, and now, I want to explain what we should have gained by doing that. Now that we have clarified, that the aim of the slogan should be focused on a specific type of audience, and be aimed at eliciting a particular response from them, all of the rest of the business slogan advice, which you may have learned over the years, should fall neatly into place.
Scott Hersh is a business blogger for BCAblog.com the official blog of BCA: leaders in merchant cash advances.
Photo credit: Sarah G on Flickr.
