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There’s a wonderful art form that probably started on Madison Avenue, maybe around the 1950s. Certainly in America. There would be cubicles in which bespectacled men chain-smoked Marlboros while coining phrases and patting themselves on the back.
These resulting slogans, jingles and taglines—made up of few words that may have little to no meaning—have gone on to transform the fortunes of businesses, turning them into household names and finding a special place in the hearts and minds of people worldwide.
A slogan is “a catchphrase or small group of words that are combined in a special way to identify a product or company.”
That “special way” refers to corporate poetry, and when done well it can be transformational for a brand. In the ’90s, thanks to Michael Jackson, Michael J. Fox and Cindy Crawford, the world was guzzling fizzy cola by the gallon. Great for Pepsi, bad for the California Milk Processor Board. Milk was out. That was, of course, until they hired Goodby Silverstein & Partners to encourage milk consumption.
Enter the milk mustache and two little words that should never really have been placed next to each other: “Got Milk?” The rest is history. (Fun fact: Michael Bay directed the ad.)
“Got Milk?” was so successful, it started a trend of grammatically incorrect and seemingly meaningless taglines that over time added billions to the bottom lines of businesses and captured imaginations globally. When Nike said “Just Do It,” we really did it, running farther and dreaming bigger while dressed head-to-toe in their apparel. When Apple coined “Think Different,” we immediately knew they were talking to us, the creatives, and it made us feel special.
The best taglines are shortcuts to brands—easily memorable, highly emotional and often acted upon. As a new wave of consumer and technological innovation was ushered in during the ’90s, taglines were by our side to guide and inspire us. Aspirational upselling at its best, and corporate America’s secret weapon in selling more stuff to more people more of the time. But as the great Bob Dylan reminds us, the times they are a-changing, and this may be the end for the tagline as we know it.
Brands now have a responsibility to be more sustainable, to create products that last longer and remind us all to buy less. Patagonia leads the way on this and, anecdotally, does not have a tagline; instead, it has a consumer-facing purpose: “We’re in business to save our home planet.” Which they live by with initiatives such as Vote the Assholes Out clothing tags.
Secondly, people are changing, and brands for the first time are reacting. This may have something to do with the Great Wealth Transfer, in which Gen Z will receive an estimated $30 trillion to $68 trillion, making them the most attractive clients to the world’s biggest brands. One thing we know for certain is they hate being sold to. We can see this in how brands are having to radically rethink how they communicate with utter authenticity, real responsibility and absolutely no selling. Why? Because Gen Z have more important things to do like fixing the broken planet we’ve left them, rebelling against the unfair wars we rage and recovering from a pandemic that has decimated their mental health.
And finally, clients are changing. New tools and endless data, mixed with an increasing pressure to sell while lifting margins and reducing churn, has made taglines less fun and therefore less memorable. Now these small groups of words, combined in a special way to identify a product or company, are sweated through endless research and made to work so hard that they lose the raw, instinctive magic of their predecessors, leaving them to fall flat rather than melt deep into the minds of a generation.
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 (don’t call them consumers, this language also belongs to the past) won’t be taken in by its simplistic charm. We must instead rethink how we communicate with such brilliant precision to a generation of makers, thinkers and creators who are far more interested in facilitating change than upgrading to the latest flat screen TV.
The tagline of tomorrow must offer something more substantial, more sustainable. It must do more than just sell. As a particularly precise corporate poet once put it: “Diamonds Are Forever.” Perhaps that’s true for the humble tagline.
