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To Tag Or Not To Tag?

By Erin Ferree

Republish: EasyPublish™
Published: 19Apr2007
Word count: 711
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A tagline is a succinct phrase that communicates some of the basics of your brand. Ideally, your tagline is also memorable and helps your target audience relate to your business.

If used correctly, a tagline can be a powerful part of your marketing strategy. Creating a phrase of a few words to uniquely identify you (or your business) in all of your marketing materials helps you to cover two of the major ways that a prospect can immediately gather information in your business communications - the prospect sees both the images of your logo and Visual Vocabulary and the text in your tagline to learn more about your brand.

The advantage of adding a tagline to other text that describes your business is that a tagline can appear on all of your marketing materials, including your business card, stationery, and other applications, where descriptive text either will not fit or is not appropriate.

Here are some tips on using a tagline in your marketing materials:

Pick one tagline and run with it.

It can be very difficult to settle on just one tagline. However, choosing one tagline and using it consistently throughout all of your materials will help your marketing materials to look consistent. The repetition of the tagline will also make your materials memorable. This consistency makes your business appear well-thought-out as opposed to scattered. Using a single, unified logo and tagline combination in all of your materials will help people recognize your business at first glance.

Decide: short tagline or long?

In general, short taglines are more memorable than long taglines. If you were to sit down and make a list of the taglines that you know, these taglines are likely to be three or four words long. The difficulty with using a short tagline for a small business is that you must then teach clients and prospects to identify your tagline with your business, which can be a difficult process, especially if your tagline is not descriptive of your business.

Although it might be more difficult to remember, a long tagline can be much more descriptive of your business. You must evaluate tradeoff between instant recognition and precision.

Should you put the tagline in the logo...?

Your logo's graphic will be stronger if it's enhanced with the words in your tagline, and the words in the tagline will be more memorable if they are reinforced by an image.

However, there are a few other factors to consider. A tagline in a logo must be rather short - otherwise, it will have to be placed in the logo in a small font size, and that will reduce the scalability of the logo to a text size that is legible.

Also, if your business name consists of more than two or three words, including the tagline in the logo might make the logo too wordy, which can lead to your business name being skipped over or ignored.

...or apart from the logo?

Another option is to use both a logo and a tagline in your materials, but to position the two apart from one another. This is a great option to consider because then your logo and tagline aren't linked quite so strongly - if you need to eventually change your tagline, it will be easier to do so. You won't lose as much brand equity if you change a tagline that is not directly attached to the logo.

When the logo and tagline are not positioned together, you can use a longer tagline - you won't be limited in your ability to scale your logo by the legibility of the tagline. Still, be careful that your tagline isn't too long - it should still be easy to remember and short enough to roll off potential clients' tongues.

You'll also be able to use your tagline as an element of your visual vocabulary, to enhance the design of all your marketing materials. It will be another visual element to make your materials look great.

We recommend that small businesses follow these tips in developing a unique, descriptive tagline, and that they use it in their marketing materials. A tagline can communicate to prospects in ways that a logo alone cannot, and a tagline will enhance your brand identity.

Erin Ferree is a brand identity and marketing design strategist who creates big visibility for small businesses. Through her customized marketing and brand identity packages, Erin helps her clients discover their brand differentiators, then designs logos, business cards, and other marketing materials and websites to reflect that differentiation, as well as to increase credibility and memorability. http://www.elf-design.com

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