Do you recognize these taglines? Do you know which company do these taglines belong to without the need to mention their names? It’s from Nike, Adidas, De Beers Group, and L’oreal respectively.

Do you ever wonder how these powerful statements were crafted? Well, I can’t give you the tips and tricks that the writer of Nike’s tagline followed though, but I can give you tips that came from me. Here’s how I did it:

1. Write long first. 

Get a pen and a paper and start scribbling down what your company does. It doesn’t matter how rubbish it is, all I need you to do is write it all down. Say, you’re planning to open a tech company, and one of the main products that you would like to offer consumers is a wall computer, wherein university professors, college instructors, and teachers can benefits from it, because now, they don’t have to bring loads of lesson plans, papers, and a laptop in the class in order to conduct a successful lesson to their students; they can just open the wall computer, and then save all of their lesson plans there, and it eradicates the need to bring a heavy projector, and all the heavy stuff, really.

Then you can write like this:

“We are a tech company who dares to differentiate ourselves from the common ones. We want to offer anything that’s new through our technology products, and it is our duty to do the innovating for you, so that you could live a much better life, a more efficient process, and not stick to the old ways.”

I gave you a sample of how you can do it, but you could write words that are lesser than that, step one’s goal is to not get it right on the first try, but to get the creative juices in you flowing, this process is important to craft a powerful tagline.

You can’t incorporate everything on your tagline, so, it’s up to you to decide on what to include when you do step one, but here are the guidelines, you can write down the following:

• Your promise to the consumers

• Your mission

• What you do

• The quality that makes you different

2. Trim it.

No, I’m not talking about your hair; it’s the tagline that needs trimming.

Kidding aside!

Anyway, going back to our main topic, on the second step, I need you to trim down what you wrote on the first step. You can trim it down to this statement:

“We strive to be the tech company that offers cool products that are 10 times better than the existing ones, and not stick to the old ways.”

3. Be specific.

Bravo for you if you’ve already accomplished step one and step two! But I don’t want you to stop at step two, because step two is a little bit boring. I mean, okay, tech company, there are a lot of tech companies out there, some offer computers, some sell cellphones, some of them sell cars, and many more. Your customers won’t know what you do if you would do what everybody else is doing, and use jargons. It was mentioned there “cool products.” Okay, cool, and what are these products? Be specific! And you can do it by writing like this:

“We want to change the way how teachers teach in the school system, by creating a new product that would help them become much better educators.”

That’s more like it. It’s specific, it offers your promise, and it says your mission. Remember: your customers must get a glimpse of what your business does after reading your tagline, so don’t confuse your customers, be specific, always!

4. Write less, at least three to six  words.

but with loads of options.

Now that you have a clear picture of what you do, you can reduce it to shorter statements now. Write as many as you like, here are my examples so you can be fully guided:

• Teach Better

• Do it on the wall

• What’s on your wall?

• It’s on the wall

• We make teaching easy

• No more handouts!

• Paperless Teaching

Are you still with me? Write it, write them all down.

5. Pick your top three.

Yes, just pick three! We’re almost there to the tagline that you will use on your marketing collaterals, your website, your Facebook page, and more. Here are mine:

• Teach Better

• No more handouts!

• Paperless Teaching

What’s yours?
Are you still writing?
You better do, because we’re almost there.

6. Sleep on it.

Okay, you can now take your break on this stage, yes, sleep on it. But before you sleep, I want you to secretly pick your favourite one out of the three, and when you wake up tomorrow, see if it’s still the tagline of your choice. You can ask the following questions:

• Can I pronounce it easily?

• Would it be memorable?

• Would consumers know what I do after reading it?

• Is it original?

• Does it stand out?

7. Decision making stage. 

If you answered “yes” to the questions written above, then congratulations! You now have your business tagline. Here’s what I picked:

Paperless Teaching
What’s yours?

8. What’s of it’s a no?

Well, if you woke up, and you’re having doubts about the tagline that you chose last night, then I want you to go back to step six, and pick one again, but eliminate the one that you already picked.