We’ve commented in this space before about how brand marketers care more about their taglines than consumers do. Not only do consumers typically not care, they are mostly unable to link taglines with the brands to which they are attached.
Sure, there some exceptions – Just do it; Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there; I’m lovin it to name a few. These are unquestionably strong, sticky lines – and they’ve had billions of advertising dollars in advertising support over the years. But most taglines never earn this kind of notice or acclaim. Taglines often serve to unite the brand team and the agency behind a what they’ve all agreed is a core brand truth. But when the team conceives of the tagline as the uniting force across ad elements that otherwise have little to nothing in common, that’s where the unfounded belief in the power of the tagline goes seriously awry.
Recently released ARF research highlights two important insights that are relevant to this topic – two insights that we also have found to be true over many years of studying how advertising works.
First, the best performing cross-platform campaigns contain common creative elements across platforms. We know that these common elements help consumers to link all of the different pieces of content to the same brand – an important function given the widespread problems with brand linkage in today’s advertising environment. Additionally, these common elements act as memory triggers – reminding consumers when they see an ad in one venue of the brand communications they’ve seen elsewhere – thus producing an amplification of persuasive impact.
And second, using brain wave analysis, the ARF observed that consumers pay hardly any attention to the taglines that appear at the end of video ads. The story’s over, time to tune out. We’ve seen the same thing – which also by the way is true of commercial end tags, but that’s another story for another day. Our observation has been that the tagline acts like the period at the end of the sentence. ‘Okay, that’s over – what’s next?’ This helps to explain why taglines, unless they are incorporated into the story, or unless they are central to the telling of the story, are so often not remembered at all.
Let’s put these two observations side by side – campaigns need common threads and taglines aren’t noticed or remembered. This tells us that campaigns that are tied together through the use of a tagline aren’t really tied together at all, and thus are not going to work as hard for a brand as the brand team hopes. The moral of the story is clear – you and your team might love your tagline, but the consumer needs something much stronger as a way to recognize and be persuaded by your brand communications.
