A tagline is the short line people remember you by. A claim is the promise behind it, the thing you actually deliver. Most companies write both in one afternoon meeting and quietly replace them a year later, because nobody in the company ever uses the line. Here are three cheap tests we run in the studio before a tagline goes into a commercial, and the boring reason the brand tagline examples you admire actually stuck.
Key takeaways
- A tagline is memorable, a claim is a promise. Most working taglines sit between two and five words.
- A claim should last years, a campaign line lasts one season. Confuse the two and you pay to build something you will throw away in six months.
- A 2013 study in the Journal of Advertising Research (Kohli, Thomas and Suri, 220 respondents and 150 slogans) found that recall improves with brevity, with long unchanged use and with media spend. Rhyme and jingles showed no measurable effect.
- Three tests before sign off: the covered logo test, the spoken word test and the three year test.
- If a line sits equally well on a competitor logo, it is not a tagline. It is filler.
- No budget to repeat it for years? Skip the tagline and spend the money on one sentence that plainly says what you sell.
What is the difference between a tagline and a claim?
A tagline is the line you remember, a claim is the promise you have to keep. The tagline works with rhythm and emotion, the claim states plainly what you get. In everyday talk the two words get mixed up and no harm done, but you do need to know which job your line is doing.
The more useful difference is lifespan. A claim sits on your website, in the presentation footer, on the van and at the end of every commercial, and it should still be there in three years. A campaign line lives for one season and is allowed to be braver, because you are not paying for it with your whole identity. Get this wrong and either you change the claim so often that nobody connects it to you, or you keep a witty campaign line for years after the company stopped doing that thing. For a wider sample before you write your own, HubSpot keeps a long list of brand tagline examples worth reading with this distinction in mind.
How do you write a tagline that outlives one campaign?
Not in a brainstorm. It comes out of deciding who the brand is not for. Until you can name the customer you are turning away, every line you write ends up sounding like "quality you can trust". Anyone can write that about anything, which is exactly why it does nothing.
The order we work in: positioning first (who, against whom, with what proof), then brand personality, then the line. If you have worked through brand archetypes and written down your tone of voice, the writing goes far faster, because you know which words belong in the brand mouth. Without that you are guessing.
Then it is craft. Twenty to fifty versions, read out loud, in one sitting. The first ten will be descriptive, the next twenty will try to be clever, and the usable three come from the end of the list. Stop at five and you are picking from whatever came to mind first.
Which three tests should a tagline pass before it goes live?
The covered logo test, the spoken word test and the three year test. They cost nothing, take an afternoon, and catch most of what otherwise surfaces after you have paid for production.
- The covered logo test. Write the line on paper with no logo and no brand typeface, then show it to ten people. Do they attribute it to you? And can you paste it onto two competitors without anything feeling off? This is how the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute scores distinctive brand assets, on two axes: how many buyers link the asset to the brand, and how exclusively it belongs to that brand. An asset that is famous but not unique is one the institute tells you to drop, because it works for the whole category rather than for you.
- The spoken word test. Say the line out loud, in a normal voice, at the end of a thirty second spot. This is where most lines die in our studio. On paper the tagline looks elegant, in the booth the tongue trips over it, the voice has to sell it with forced intonation, and you hear the advertising instantly. A tagline that works can be said like an ordinary sentence and something still sticks.
- The three year test. Can you live with it for three years and afford to repeat it that long? Here is the uncomfortable finding. The 2013 Journal of Advertising Research study by Chiranjeev Kohli, Sunil Thomas and Rajneesh Suri tested recall of 150 slogans with 220 respondents and found three things that lift recall: brevity, long unchanged use and advertising spend. Rhyme, jingles and cleverness did not register. Put plainly, creativity will not save a tagline. Repetition will.
If you want the strategist view of the tagline versus claim split, this video covers it well:
When do you not need a tagline at all?
When you cannot afford to repeat it for three years. This paragraph does our studio no favours, but it is true. A two person company with a few hundred euros a month in marketing gets more out of one plain sentence that says what it does and for whom than out of a metaphorical tagline. Someone seeing you for the first time needs to understand you before they can be charmed by you.
You also do not need one if you own a stronger recognition cue already. A brand with an iconic colour, a sound or a founder face has attribution solved and a line adds little. And if you do want a tagline, let it live inside the company first. If sales are not using it in emails after a month, a billboard will not rescue it. It belongs in the brand manual only once it has passed all three tests.
How do you test a tagline in one afternoon?
You need three sheets of paper, ten people and a phone. No agency, no budget.
- Write your three finalists on three sheets, with no logo and no brand typeface.
- Show them to ten people who know you only vaguely and ask one question: whose line is this?
- Paste the same three versions next to two competitor logos. Cross out anything that fits just as well there.
- Read the survivors out loud five times in a row and record it on your phone. Listen back the next day, not the same evening.
- Under each survivor write one sentence: how we prove this. If there is no proof, the line is lying, and customers check.
- Finally write down a date three years out and ask whether the company will still be this company then.
If none of the three survive, that is good news. You saved the production money and you know the problem is positioning, not copywriting. We work the same way on creative and concept: the line is the last thing written, never the first.
Frequently asked questions about taglines and claims
How long should a tagline be?
As short as you can make it. Most working lines land between two and five words, and the 2013 Journal of Advertising Research study found shorter slogans are recalled better. A rule from the recording booth: if you cannot say it on one breath in a calm voice, it is too long.
How often should a claim change?
Ideally never, realistically once every five to ten years, and only when what you sell or who you sell it to has changed. Changing the claim means rebuilding attribution from zero. Campaign lines are the opposite and can change every season.
What does a tagline cost?
Buying a tagline on its own is rare and usually a bad idea, because a line without positioning is a lottery. It normally sits inside a larger positioning and identity project and its cost disappears into that. With no budget for strategy, write three versions yourself and run them through the tests above. That is cheaper than a bad line on a billboard.
Should the tagline be in English or in the local language?
Use the language your customer thinks in about your category. A local line is easier to remember and harder to confuse with a competitor at home, while English makes sense when you sell abroad or the category speaks English anyway. The worst option is an English line that half the market misreads and the other half translates its own way.
If the spoken word test tells you your line only works on paper, talk to us. We will go through the positioning, write the versions and put one in a voice booth so you hear it before you pay for production. Write to us through contact and send whatever you already have.
