Ask any copywriter: campaign taglines are a ’mare to get right.
In order to be effective, a campaign tagline…
- …needs to be memorable
- …needs to be unique
- …needs to be clear
- …needs to work on a rational level
- …also needs to work on an emotional level
- …must be a distillation of the campaign them
- …must align with the brand values
- …must, above all, really resonate with the target audience – a target audience that’s likely to comprise several disparate personas
And it needs to do all this, ideally, in six words tops.
As I said, it’s a ’mare. But it is totally doable, if you know what you’re doing. You just need a bit of creativity, a shedload of brand and audience insights, and a strong client/agency relationship – one built on trust, patience and openness.
Let’s take a behind-the-curtain look at the tagline-creation process, using a recent campaign we devised for TalkTalk Business.
June 2023: Briefing
The Don’t be Shy team received its brief from long-time client TalkTalk Business. The brief asked for a “brand-level campaign focused on a new value proposition”, with the dual aim of building awareness and generating leads.
TalkTalk Business wanted to be positioned “as a leader in flexible, resilient connectivity, offering a wide array of products and services”. The campaign would showcase benefits such as TalkTalk Business’s huge fibre footprint access, quick install times and industry-leading SLAs.
Something else we had to consider: due to several internal and technological changes, TalkTalk Business’s previous value proposition had shifted – fairly dramatically, and for the better.
The audience for the campaign was relatively broad: IT leaders at SMEs and enterprises, across three key UK sectors: retail, hospitality and logistics.
The campaign was scheduled to go live in September 2023. It would, of course, need a tagline.
July 2023: Questions, tensions, compromises and consensus
To pin down the new brand proposition, Don’t be Shy held a workshop at TalkTalk Business’s Salford headquarters. Stakeholders from across TalkTalk Business were present – with not only the marketing team represented, but the sales and IT teams too.
By working to get cross-departmental consensus from the outset, we ensured the campaign – and its all-important tagline – would get company-wide buy-in and support.
Of course, there were differences of opinion. After all, these were senior stakeholders, from different areas of the business, and with differing perspectives. But enough common ground was found to establish the consensus we were after.
By combining the workshop outputs with desk research into wider industry trends, we had enough insights to build a campaign around.
July 2023: Thinking caps on
In the telecoms space, it can be difficult to establish an overarching USP for a brand. After all, as one stakeholder noted in the workshop: “The internet is the internet, no matter who provides your connectivity.” And with the telecoms market being so ferociously competitive, there are often only minor differences in the products, services or packages offered by rival providers (with the rare exceptions being higher-value services such as SD-WAN).
There was limited value, then, in opting for a campaign tagline that focused on a specific TalkTalk Business product, service or package. After all, the majority of competitors could boast about ‘lightning-fast business connectivity’ or ‘bespoke, flexible pricing’ in tagline. So what really made TalkTalk Business different?
Time to stick Post-Its on the wall, and then scrutinise them until ideas start to form. While the Planning team began thinking about the mechanics of the campaign – channels, targeting, buyer journeys and so on – the Content team set about mining the insights for an updated value proposition, a campaign messaging framework, and a campaign tagline.
As we did so, two threads began to intertwine:
1) Taken as a whole, TalkTalk Business’s new proposition felt like it was very much ‘on the side’ of UK businesses. It felt thoughtful, sympathetic, forward-looking and optimistic.
2) UK businesses had taken something of a battering in recent years: Brexit, then the pandemic, then the cost-of-living crisis had created some of the harshest trading conditions in living memory. The TalkTalk Business team wanted to shield UK businesses from this perfect storm, in any way they possibly could.
Keeping these two threads front-of-mind, the Content and Planning teams began brainstorming taglines. We managed to generate 19 in all (with a few additional, reworded variations). And with a bit of merciless self-critiquing, we got these down to three. Next: present them to the client.
August 2023: Kill your darlings
Once again convening a varied selection of TalkTalk Business stakeholders – for that all-important consensus – we unveiled an updated value proposition, a campaign messaging framework, and our three tagline options:
1) The new gold standard in business networks
2) Same as everyone else. (Except bigger, better, faster.)
3) Nobody backs business like us
Again, there wasn’t instant unanimity among the stakeholders. Option one was widely liked, but viewed as overly safe by some. Option two – the ‘edgy one’ – was dismissed as being overly superlative, and required the claims it made – “bigger, better, faster” – to be instantly justified with figures.
In the end, option three won out. The TalkTalk Business team liked its boldness, positivity and authenticity. It felt truly ownable, and something the business could utilise across an array of touchpoints, potentially beyond the planned campaign.
The tagline spoke to TalkTalk Business’s offer, but also to the wider UK economy. It was a defiant vote of confidence, at a time when doomsayers were predicting a deep recession and a decline in the UK’s global business standing.
August 2023: All hands on deck
The chosen tagline was now incorporated into the message-framework deck. The slide containing the main messaging – a one-stop summary of the campaign’s tone and talking points – now set up the narrative behind the tagline:
We now had the full backstory for our tagline. We had confirmed that it worked not only in isolation, but also within the context of TalkTalk Business’s value proposition.
We presented the full messaging framework and – a couple of amends and language-tweaks aside – our TalkTalk Business stakeholders signed it off.
Time for ‘Nobody backs business like us’ to make its way out into the world.
September 2023: Hit the launch button
Our Creative team produced a suite of reusable campaign design elements, alongside a guide for future usage of ‘Nobody backs business like us’ within TalkTalk Business’s branding. The tagline would eventually appear across everything from targeted social ads to PPC; from email campaigns to sector-specific ads in The Caterer and Retail Gazette.
The Creative and Content teams also collaborated on a 30-second campaign video, built around the messaging framework, and signing off with our hard-earned, consensus-driven tagline. Our five words were about to meet an audience of hundreds of thousands.
Looking for a campaign tagline or brand slogan that’ll stop people in their tracks? We’ll find the perfect five-word phrase for your business – get in touch, and let’s talk.
