5 Reasons You Should Unshackle Your Community from the Tagline

The Happiest Place on Earth. What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas. The City That Never Sleeps. We know effective place taglines exist, and the very best have found permanence with no sign of becoming obsolete anytime soon. But are taglines a dying form? 

It’s easy to look at successful examples and feel compelled to attach a catchy, if not elusive, phrase or slogan to your community, but the truth is that taglines can limit your creativity and they often leave your audience scratching their heads. The successful examples we see in the media today don’t just happen overnight. They were built up by strategic marketing and campaigns that gave them the leg they now stand on.   

Our advice? Unshackle your community from the tagline and focus your efforts on what made those taglines great to begin with. Here are five reasons you should let go of the ever-so-catchy turn of phrases and channel that energy into great campaigns.  

Don’t trade creativity for consensus 

The branding process can be difficult for a community. Everyone wants to see a destination thrive, and everyone believes that they know how best to make that happen. However, strong feelings can be a detriment to the creative process. 

If you work in branding, you know that getting large teams, or even just a few people, to agree on branding elements can feel like herding cats. You might start out with several creative ideas for a tagline, but once everyone has had their say, you’re left with a phrase that’s either bland or barely makes sense to the community.  

Your community is original. Is your tagline?  

Each community is unique, with its own quirks, stories and history. In big cities like Austin, Las Vegas and New York, you can get away with attaching a tagline to the majority. Is everyone in Austin “weird,” or is everyone in New York caught in the hustle bustle going 24/7? Of course not. However, after years of campaigns supporting the “Keep Austin Weird” and “The City That Never Sleeps” taglines, a sense of comradery has emerged. 

However, in smaller communities where trends are more diverse and harder to pinpoint, a tagline is more likely to divide, not unite. Don’t risk generalizing a unique community for the sake of having a catchy phrase to add to keychains and t-shirts. Embrace differences and use them to build strong campaigns.  

Campaigns are flexible, taglines could be forever 

Sometimes it’s nice to think about something lasting forever, but when that something is a few words that may permanently define an ever-changing community, the thought can be a little scary. Avoid cold feet and pour your energy into crafting a meaningful campaign that captures your community in the present. If you build it strong enough, your audience might find organic permanence along the way.   

Take Nike’s infamous “Just Do It” tagline for example. What started off as a campaign in 1988 to help bolster the small brand’s reach and capture its motivational spirit turned into a whole brand identity. The slogan was never supposed to stick and only made it through approvals because CEO Dan Weiden assured everyone involved that it could easily be dropped next round. They poured creativity into the campaign itself and the message resonated with Nike’s audience… and it still does today.  

Is it really the happiest place on Earth?  

People have opinions – sometimes lots of them – that they are not afraid to share. Creating a tagline that pleases everyone in a community is an impossible feat, so setting out to develop one is a recipe for disaster. And even if you win and get most of a community on board, it’s only a matter of time before a new public official takes office and decides to rebrand.   

We live in a world where consumers want to see personalized messaging and are more interested in a brand’s relevance to their own lives than a general static message meant to relate to the masses. Offer them what they really want, a brand that encompasses a whole place, not “corporate poetry” that has no sustenance.  

Less is the new more  

AdWeek said it best when it said “The tagline as we know it—bite-size and brilliant, honed and crafted, awkward and immediate—feels like it belongs to another time, one of infinite choice and eternal optimism. Today’s world demands something new.” This generation cares about sustainability and building things that are meant to last. They want brands to say what they mean and mean what they say more than they want a whimsical slogan that falls flat.   

Brands like Patagonia are leading the charge when it comes to this, as evident in their consumer- facing purpose “We’re in business to save our home planet.” No gimmicks, no corporate poetry, just a motto that they back up with smart initiatives. This generation doesn’t want to be sold to. They want brands and places to be transparent, and they’ll decide the rest.  

Conclusion 

Taglines might not be dead yet, and they may never be. But one thing is for sure and that’s that actions always speak louder than words. Don’t waste your time trying to craft the perfect three-word phrase and instead devote time and energy into good campaigns that represent a place and evolve with it. What works will stick and what doesn’t, well, c’est la vie!  

If you have questions about the branding or creative process, please reach out to Senior Vice President, Dariel Curren at Dariel.Curren@old.aboutdci.com.