The Death of the Tagline
Once, a brand could be captured in a phrase. Now, brands are afraid of phrases.
When Avis said "We try harder," they captured in three words everything that mattered about their brand: the acknowledgement that they were not the market leader, the promise that they would compensate with effort, and the implicit flattery of the consumer who chooses substance over status. Three words. A generation of travellers understood exactly what Avis stood for, and they understood it because the tagline was specific, honest, and memorable. The tagline did not describe the brand. The tagline was the brand, distilled to its essence.
I have been collecting taglines for most of my career — not in the systematic way that I collect headlines, but in the casual, magpie way that one collects things that catch the eye. "Just Do It." "Think Different." "A Diamond Is Forever." "We Try Harder." "The Ultimate Driving Machine." These are not merely slogans. They are compressions — dense packages of meaning that encode a brand's identity, its promise, and its attitude in the smallest possible space. Each one took months or years to develop. Each one represents a creative achievement of the highest order. And each one belongs, I increasingly fear, to a tradition that is dying.
What Has Changed
The modern marketing landscape is hostile to taglines, and the reasons are both structural and cultural. Structurally, the proliferation of channels and platforms has made consistency harder to maintain. A brand that once needed a single tagline for its print and television advertising now needs messaging for its website, its social media presence, its email marketing, its content strategy, its app, its chatbot, and whatever platform emerges next week. The tagline, which was designed to unify a campaign across a small number of channels, seems inadequate to the task of unifying a brand across dozens of touchpoints.
Culturally, there has been a shift away from the kind of definitive statement that a tagline represents. Brands today are afraid of commitment. They are afraid of being pinned down. They want to be agile, flexible, responsive. They want to adapt their messaging to different audiences and different moments. A tagline feels rigid. It feels limiting. It feels — and this is the word I hear most often — old-fashioned.
I understand these concerns. I do not share them.
The Case for Compression
The tagline is not a relic of a simpler media landscape. It is a solution to a problem that has only become more acute: the problem of attention. In a world where consumers are exposed to thousands of messages every day, the brand that can compress its identity into a single memorable phrase has an enormous advantage over the brand that requires a paragraph to explain itself. The tagline is a mnemonic device, a cognitive shortcut, a piece of mental real estate that the brand occupies in the consumer's mind. It is not old-fashioned. It is essential.
Consider the practical reality. A consumer encounters your brand in a social media feed. They have a fraction of a second to register who you are and what you stand for. A tagline gives them something to hold onto — a phrase that encodes your identity and triggers the associations you have worked to build. Without a tagline, you are a logo and a colour palette, and logos and colour palettes, however well-designed, do not communicate meaning. They communicate identity. Meaning requires words, and the tagline is the most efficient form of meaningful words that advertising has ever devised.
Rosser Reeves, who was not the most beloved figure in advertising history but who understood selling as well as anyone, built his entire philosophy around the Unique Selling Proposition — a single, clear, compelling statement of what the product offered that its competitors did not. The USP was not a tagline, exactly, but it was the raw material from which taglines were made. "Melts in your mouth, not in your hands." This is a USP expressed as a tagline, and it is as effective today as it was when it was written, because it states a specific, memorable, differentiating benefit in seven words. No amount of content marketing or social media activation or influencer strategy can achieve what those seven words achieve.
Why Brands Have Stopped Trying
I have a theory about why brands have stopped trying to develop good taglines, and it has nothing to do with the media landscape. It has to do with committees. A tagline is a commitment. It is a public statement of what the brand stands for, and it will be scrutinised, analysed, and criticised by everyone from the CEO to the Twitter trolls. This makes it terrifying. A brand that has no tagline cannot be criticised for having a bad tagline. A brand that changes its messaging quarterly cannot be held to any particular statement. The absence of a tagline is, in this sense, a form of corporate cowardice — the refusal to say anything definitive for fear of saying the wrong thing.
I have sat in meetings where the development of a tagline was discussed, debated, researched, tested, revised, re-researched, re-tested, and ultimately abandoned, over a period of months. The problem was never that the options were bad. The problem was that no one in the room had the authority or the courage to choose. Each option had its advocates and its detractors. Each option tested well with some segments and poorly with others. Each option could be attacked on some ground — too bold, too generic, too limiting, too clever, too simple. The committee, unable to agree, chose the safest option, which was no option at all. The brand continued without a tagline, and the months of work were wasted, and the brand was no more distinctive than it had been before.
This is a failure of leadership, not a failure of the form. The great taglines were not produced by committees. They were produced by writers — individual writers with a point of view and the conviction to defend it — and they were approved by clients who had the courage to commit. "Just Do It" was written by Dan Wieden and approved by Nike. The focus groups did not love it. The committees did not love it. But the people with the authority to decide loved it, and they were right, and three decades later it remains one of the most powerful brand statements in the world.
The Craft of the Tagline
Writing a good tagline is among the most difficult tasks in copywriting. I say this having written hundreds of them, of which perhaps five were genuinely good. The difficulty lies in the compression. You must take everything that is important about a brand — its proposition, its personality, its promise, its point of difference — and express it in a phrase that is short enough to remember, clear enough to understand, and distinctive enough to own. Every word must earn its place. Every syllable matters. The margin for error is zero.
I approach a tagline the way a poet approaches a line of verse — with the understanding that in compressed forms, precision is everything. A word that is almost right is wrong. A rhythm that is slightly off is off. A phrase that is clear but not memorable fails, and a phrase that is memorable but not clear fails equally. The tagline must do both, simultaneously, in the space of a few words. It is the highest form of commercial writing, and like all high forms, it is nearly impossible to do well.
The great taglines share certain qualities. They are concrete rather than abstract. "Just Do It" is a command, not a sentiment. "We Try Harder" is a promise, not a platitude. "The Ultimate Driving Machine" is a claim, not an aspiration. The concreteness is what makes them memorable, because concrete language activates the mind in a way that abstract language does not. "Empowering your potential" activates nothing. "Just Do It" activates everything.
They are also, without exception, the product of a single mind. Taglines cannot be written by groups. They cannot be assembled from the best parts of several options. They cannot be synthesised from research findings. They are acts of individual creativity — the moment when one writer, sitting with the problem, finds the phrase that no one has found before. This is why committees cannot produce them. The committee can evaluate a tagline. It cannot create one.
A Plea
I am aware that this essay is, in part, an old man's lament for a form he loves. I accept that characterisation. But I believe the lament is justified, because the tagline is not merely a stylistic preference. It is a strategic tool of enormous power, and its decline represents a genuine loss — a loss of clarity, of commitment, of the willingness to say, in public, "This is what we stand for."
To the brand managers reading this: your brand needs a tagline. Not a purpose statement. Not a brand manifesto. Not a set of values. A tagline — a short, memorable, specific phrase that captures what your brand offers and why it matters. Hire a good writer. Give them time. Trust their judgement. And when they present you with something that makes you slightly uncomfortable, something that feels too bold or too specific or too committed — pay attention. That discomfort is the feeling of distinctiveness. It is the feeling of saying something that actually means something. Embrace it.
The tagline is not dead. It is waiting for someone brave enough to write one.