A tagline is forever

Every so often, a brand will stumble upon the perfect slogan.

Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.

You’re in good hands with Allstate.

Democracy dies in darkness.

We try harder.

The few. The proud. The Marines.

Reassuringly expensive.

There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.

Tastes great. Less filling.

Impossible is nothing.

Taste the rainbow.

Outfly the ordinary.

Tastes so good, cats ask for it by name.

One call. That’s All.

Let your fingers do the walking.

(To be clear, we’re using the words tagline and slogan interchangeably. You can too!)

One of these you’ve likely never seen before. A few you might not recognize. Many of these taglines are sadly no longer with us. The Washington Post recently changed its tagline to “Riveting storytelling for all of America,” which is nowhere near as defiant as “Democracy dies in darkness.” Also, today we let our thumbs do the scrolling, because what even is a phone book?

What makes a great slogan? It’s both distinctive and associated with your brand.

So what does distinctive mean? Different, interesting, memorable. Sometimes there’s alliteration or repetition or parallel antithesis. Sometimes you’ll find a double meaning, a category entry point, a fun observation about human (or cat) nature, a brand promise, a little emotion, a bit of swagger or a clever little joke.

The only thing a slogan cannot be is dull. Why? Because the mind is still the most important search engine. Marketing is a memory game, and our job is to get your brand to the top of as many consideration sets of as many people as possible. Dull does the opposite of that.

If you’ve got a good slogan, cherish it for the treasure that it is, because you have to use that slogan everywhere in everything all the time for a very long time, so it becomes associated with your brand.

Can distinctive brand assets evolve? Sure, but as Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has shown over and over again, it can take years for a distinctive brand asset like a tagline to become unique and ownable. Don’t change stuff unless you really, really have to. Speaking of which …

Earlier this year, Adidas dropped their “Impossible is nothing” tagline and replaced it with “You got this.”

The new campaign looks great, and we love the insight behind it: Every sport is a team sport, because every athlete needs friends, family, teammates and coaches in their corner. The ad is emotional. There’s human connection, though there could be more. Overall it’s sweet, stirring, grounded yet aspirational. Which? Seems like something new.

For example, take Nike’s recent “So win” campaign. Like a lot of advertising in the sporting apparel category, it celebrates the relentless pursuit of elite, individual athletic achievement. And to be clear, these women are elite athletes who have 1000% earned the right to be celebrated. But the message is about winning, and the focus is on the individual athlete. The new Adidas campaign feels like a sea change.

As a tagline, though, “You got this” seems a little flat and generic. Worse, it feels unownable. Sure, you could argue that “Just do it” feels flat and generic, and it’s only ownable because Nike has spent billions of dollars over the past 37 years to own it. You’d be right. However …

“Impossible is nothing” is stickier and more memorable than “You got this.” So why’d they change it? Apparently it doesn’t fit with their new brand positioning.

Andrew Tindall, senior vice president at System1 and columnist at The Drum, argues that the new tagline was necessary because Adidas and competitors like Under Armor and Nike had all been playing in the same “relentless pursuit of individual athletic excellence” space for a long time.

Adidas, however, has been losing. Sales have been down over the past few years, so they decided to take their ball and go play somewhere else. Which? Is a solid, strategic choice, as Tindall points out.

Did they really need to change their tagline, though? Is “Impossible is nothing” so disconnected from the new brand position that it’s unusable? Is it really worth investing in a new brand asset? That’s not a rhetorical question, because it’s not an easy decision to make.

So what does this mean for you?

Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk and other researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have shown over and over again that meaningless distinctiveness is more valuable than differentiation.

We don’t love the word “meaningless” here, but it is true that people don’t really consider brands to be all that different. They spend very little time thinking about brands at all … and even less time trying to figure out the meaning of different taglines.

Does that mean taglines and slogans don’t matter? They matter. They’re as vitally important as any of your other distinctive brand assets. If you have one, it absolutely needs to be distinctive, memorable and associated with your brand. Something like “For a brighter human future” is vague, dull, forgettable and bad, while “Taste the rainbow” is glorious. If you’re not sure why, and we mean this sincerely, please reach out.

If you have a great tagline, hold it tight and don’t let go.

It’s very easy to blame a decline in sales on a Distinctive Brand Asset like an “outdated logo” or a tagline that no longer seems relevant. But, as Jenni Romaniuk points out in “Building Distinctive Brand Assets,” changing your DBAs is “likely to damage the brand’s long-term identity.” Again, marketing is a memory game, and brand memories need to be continuously reinforced. Distinctive Brand Assets anchor your brand in the minds of potential buyers.

There is a world where Adidas’ new campaign, new positioning and the old “Impossible is nothing” slogan work together. We don’t live in that world, and that’s fine. Adidas has a world-class marketing team with more consumer insights than they probably know what to do with. Obviously, they didn’t make this change on a whim. Still …

The new campaign is great, the new positioning is smart, but the new tagline feels like a miss. Not a big miss. Not a miss the size of, say, a cracker barrel. A tiny miss. But it does seem to follow a trend we’ve seen over the past few years where brand assets like fonts, logos and taglines are flattened into nothingness.

There’s a commodification of brand assets going on, and we don’t like it.

We’ll see you next time!

Sources!

Impossible Is Nothing was a winning hand for Adidas. Its bold new direction will be too – The Drum
How Brands Grow, part 2 – Jenni Romaniuk, Byron Sharp