I’ve had many clients struggle trying [...]]]> Your brand name is a good start in creating the verbal expression of your brand. To convey a richer story, you need more than that. Call it a tagline, strapline, or slogan, a short, catchy phrase may help take many brands to the next level.

I’ve had many clients struggle trying to create the ideal tagline. Some struggle to define products that are hard to describe. Others struggle with an extremely diverse array of products. Still others are saddled with boring and hard to remember slogans.

Here are several approaches that can help you break through the frustration to create a tagline that truly works. Taglines can take a number of forms, depending on your communication goals:

Descriptive: If you have an uncommon or confusing product or if you have chosen an unusual brand name, your tagline can add clarity. A downside of descriptive taglines is that they tend to be boring. Yet a number of companies have managed to avoid that pitfall. BMW wins with “The Ultimate Driving Machine.”  Rice Krispies goes a step further to describe the experience of the product with “Snap, Krackle, Pop.”

Benefit Based: You can help customers visualize the value of your brand by focusing attention on its key benefit. Disney promised to be “The Happiest Place on Earth,” and FedEx delivers “The World On Time.”

Point of Difference: In a highly competitive market place, moving beyond the benefit to what makes your brand better can help you stand out. John Deere claims “Nothing Runs Like a Deere,” 7Up is famously “The Uncola.” Pork is positioned as “The Other White Meat.” Bounty paper towels are “The Quicker Picker Upper.”

Witty Catchphrase: Some brands have achieved places in pop culture with catchphrases that have caught fire. Budweiser had “Wassup.” The California Milk Processor Board created “Got Milk?” Verizon eternally asks “Can you hear me now?”

Personality: Your tagline can establish the personality of your brand. “Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?” contrasts with Hooter’s “Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined.”

Visionary: Companies with lots of products sold in many countries often struggle with a tagline that embraces their far flung businesses. In these cases, a tagline that evokes the mission or vision of the company can be very effective. GE is “Imagination at work,” whether talking about train locomotives or microwave ovens. Dupont is about “The Miracles of Science.”

Provocative or Motivating: Telling your customers what to do or why your brand is important is another way to approach finding an effective tagline. AFLAC tells people to “Ask about it at work.” Michelin reminds us “Because so much is riding on your tires.”

When you are developing tagline options, we recommend creating several ideas that fall in each of the above categories. Thinking in new ways can help you get past creative roadblocks. You just might find that one winning phrase!

But, common sense is not as common as you might hope.

A purported social media expert working for a leading social media agency tweeted this for Chrysler: “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the Motorcity and yet [...]]]> “Don’t use the F-Bomb” is a seemingly common sense rule when using social media for corporate purposes.

But, common sense is not as common as you might hope.

A purported social media expert working for a leading social media agency tweeted this for Chrysler: “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the Motorcity and yet no one here knows how to fucking drive.”

If a pro can make such a big mistake, how can you protect your brand when your employees tweet and post on your brand’s behalf?

While you can’t create common sense through policy, it does make sense to provide guidelines.  A social media policy does more than make clear what mistakes to avoid. It helps you use the social media more effectively.

Here are some basic points to cover:

• Make sure people know they are personally responsible for what they write. Once something has been said, it can’t be unsaid, and there is no telling who will see what is written. Everyone should think twice before hitting the “share” button.
• Be real. Don’t create a fake persona or a faceless corporate presence. Use your real name and identify your relationship with the brand. Compare how Toyota uses real people vs. Chevy’s faceless corporation approach.
• Think about your audience. You will be talking to clients, future clients, employees, bosses, suppliers, competitors—everybody. Be careful not to alienate them. Ray Catena Lexus, a New York area car dealer “likes” The Mets on their Facebook page—how do Yankee fans feel?
• Stay away from religion, politics and sex. Good advice for polite company at a dinner party is also good advice for using social media. Be especially careful when thinking of voicing a negative opinion about anything—and never badmouth the competition.
• Don’t get defensive. Your company may come under criticism. Resist the urge to fight back. Be polite to detractors and use the opportunity to present additional information and resources. Don’t call people names or denigrate their thinking.
• Don’t misuse copyrighted material. Be sure to provide attribution for any material you share. Never post confidential material.
• Be helpful, bring value, be amusing. Don’t just blare out commercial messages and public relations fluff. If you get a reputation for being a walking, talking commercial, you’ll be considered a spammer and will be tuned out—often rudely.

The Social Media Governance Web site has an impressive library of real social media policies from many different types of companies. These can provide a template for your company’s social media policy as well as give you an idea of what issues other companies have faced and how they dealt with them.

Don’t try [...]]]> Rance Crain has an interesting post in Advertising Age: “Back in the Mad Men days, when the “pioneers of advertising,” as my old boss Stan Cohen calls them, ruled the roost, it was commonly held that a little exaggeration was not unreasonable to accentuate the selling points of the ad messages.”

Don’t try that today.

Between bloggers and Tweeters, your advertising “exaggeration” will be called out as a lie and your brand will suffer.

Consider these two recent stories:

On the one hand, Chevy Volt initially claimed a 40 mile range per battery charge. Check Twitter and you will find it is between 23 and 25.  GM has “revised” the claim to between 25 and 50 miles–still not quite in line with what consumers who use the product are reporting. The buzz on the Volt brand is not positive. Despite GM’s revision, angry tweeters and bloggers continue to attack the discrepancy. The lack of range and lack of “clarity” on the part of GM is one of the reasons depressing demand for the product.

Contrast that with Taco Bell and the “not beef” controversy. A law firm in Alabama sued the company claiming it was not actually using beef in its tacos–and it invested plenty in promoting its beefless claim to get major coverage from media major and minor. Taco Bell has shown that when your brand is honest and does a good job of getting the true story out there, it can weather a public relations storm. Witness how Taco Bell responded to a lawsuit charging the company with not using real beef. The company responded with an integrated campaign combining traditional public relations and newspaper advertising along with new details on its website, offering to give away 10 million tacos to people who “like” its  Facebook page and a straightforward  video on YouTube featuring Taco Bell  President Greg Creed saying, “Our seasoned beef recipe contains 88 percent quality USDA inspected beef.” In addition to listing the beef content, he provides a detailed list of the remaining ingredients. The response has been overwhelmingly positive.

From Wikileak threats to Twitter snipes, the truth about your brand will get out. Exaggeration no longer sells, it repells.

Messages like these are not only boring, they [...]]]> Companies struggle with what to say to potential customers and consumers. Too often, they fall back on a recitation of facts and claims:

• We are the leading…
• For over 40 years, we have been…
• Drawing on deep industry expertise, we…
• Headquartered in New York City, we are the…

Messages like these are not only boring, they fail to be relevant and fail to motivate. They do nothing for your marketing.

Leo Burnett has released a new tool that can help any company do a better job talking to their customers. The idea is that communications should be based on your audiences’ values, attitudes and behaviors.  The agency reviewed dozens of existing behavioral theories and studies and then conducted more than 10,000 interviews with classifications of 1,500 to 1,800 discreet behaviors. They clustered the behaviors into eight discrete categories:

• The green inner ring contains the eight behavior categories/values/motivators.
• In the light green center as specific behavior examples fitting within each category.
• The light gray ring contains the negative extreme or result of each behavior category.
• The outer ring contains our most likely behavior when a value or motivation is thwarted by something we do not control.

Marketers can look at specific values and behaviors associated with each category in order to craft messages. They can also look at adjacent behavior categories or opposite behavior categories for inspiration.

An example cited by Leo Burnett is Allstate and its “Mayhem” campaign. The campaign seeks to persuade people who might be buying cheaper insurance that such behavior isn’t really “preservation” behavior. They think they may be increasing their financial security by carefully choosing a budget conscious policy. The “Mayhem” campaign crosses to the opposite side of the behavior wheel suggesting that these careful people should make a change. “Mayhem” shows that they are actually more vulnerable to loss and disruption with a low-cost policy.

If you are refining how you talk to your customers, map them against this wheel. Don’t start with what you want to say, start with what they value, what motivates them, and what lies behind their behavior.

More on this tool—visit Advertising Age and Leo Burnett’s blog .

The brand [...]]]> Burson-Marsteller released a study that claims 76% of blogs were off message. They analyzed more than 150 messages sent out by companies listed  in the Financial Times Global 100 and discovered a large gap between the official brand messages and how they were reflected on blogs, in tweets, and on other social media posts.

The brand message problems stem from a number of deficiencies by corporate marketing operations including:

1) Having no clear plan or objectives for communications on the social Web. An example here: Ziploc: Boring Doesn’t Work as a Social Media Engagement Strategy

2) Failure to understand that how social media is used is as important as what is said. More detail here:  Social Media Brand Engagement Rules:  Toyota vs Chevrolet

3) Failing to have a social media policy. A great library of social media policy examples from companies large and small that you can freely access, download, and adapt can be found here.

4) Not providing communicators outside of the marketing department with writing guidelines to explain how to write freely, but still stay “on brand.” This example from Diebold explains the brand’s voice. Diebold’s Branded Voice Guidelines. At Merriam Associates, we also include example messages so that people can see guidelines come to life (and re-use pre-written, pre-approved content.)

5) Lack of adequate control–things get “published” without enough oversight or double-checking. Once something is “out” it can’t be pulled back “in”. This article Viral Marketing Making Your Brand Sick is one example as is this mistake from Target from Halloween.

1) Providing [...]]]> A shocking number of companies miss a critical opportunity to communicate in search engine results. What you say in Google, Bing and Yahoo! impacts traffic to your site and your brand image.  Yet, too many companies let programmers write this marketing copy. Here are the five most common search engine results copy writing mistakes:

1) Providing no information at all. No title. No description. No reason to visit. No idea of what the company does.

2) Leaving the placeholder text from the software used to build the Web site in place. Surely the government of Massachusetts has more to say than promote Joomla! Web content management software.

3) Allowing random content to populate search engine results. Here is one “huh?” example from Elan Corporation, a pharmaceutical company:

Here is another example of random content from Healthnet:

Instead of offering directions for finding a subscriber number, Healthnet could have used the search results to talk about the “Healthnet: A better decision” brand positioning or they could have offered their company description: “Health Net, Inc. is among the nation’s largest publicly traded managed health care companies. Its mission is to help people be healthy, secure and comfortable.”

4) Just listing what you sell, packing in as many search terms as possible, but offering no real compelling reason to visit the site.

5) Allowing your description to exceed the allotted space or simply not using the space you have efficiently. In general, you have 60 characters to use for your title and 160 for your page description. Take this example from Corning:

The title is short and generic. Instead of being just “Corning Incorporated | Home”, the title could have included branding: “Corning: The world leader in specialty glass and ceramics”. That would have left plenty of room for a succinct and compelling description: “Corning has 150 years of materials science expertise and process engineering knowledge. We turn possibilities into breakthrough realities.”

Getting traffic to your site requires that you effectively communicate who you are and why someone should visit. Brand communicators need to get actively involved in how their company appears in search engine results pages. This copy needs to be “on brand”, rich in keywords, and should encourage people to click and visit. This communication is too important to be left by default to Web page programmers.

Wow! With a tagline of “Get more out of it!” I expect more out of Ziploc.

Maybe this major brand thought they needed to “do something” in social media, but couldn’t figure out what that something might be. It is hard [...]]]> While I was taking out the recycling, this little brochure fluttered from my empty Ziploc package:

Wow! With a tagline of “Get more out of it!” I expect more out of Ziploc.

Maybe this major brand thought they needed to “do something” in social media, but couldn’t figure out what that something might be. It is hard to imagine anyone having so much free time that they would go to Facebook to get tips on using plastic bags. I checked up on Facebook.com/Ziploc and was shocked to find 3,723 people are indeed looking for Ziploc recipes and ideas. Though thousands more than I expected, that level of social engagement can’t possibly be worth the cost to print the flier.

Social engagement by big brands is becoming more sophisticated and effective every day. You don’t have to look too far to find ideas that work. Consider the fully integrated and interactive program behind the Mountain Dewmocracy campaign, or strategies that offer an attractive value, such as the Marshall’s Shopping Spree campaign, or the Visa campaign to promote their Visa Business Network connecting small businesses with one another. Another innovative winner is The Victoria’s Secret Facebook page that is rich with activities, including sneak previews, exclusive sale items, event notices, and even the PINK Undercover Fashion Challenge, where fans can create their own personal style collages and win money and “exposure”. This late in the game, marketers have no excuse to use Facebook to offer a few tips and recipes and call it a social engagement strategy.

Ziploc needs to rethink their Facebook effort. Boring is never a good, especially in social media. With some creative thinking Ziploc could turn their paltry 3, 723 likes into numbers approaching those of Victoria’s Secret nearing 7 million.