Business Slogans

If you are a business owner and you’re interested in injecting a little bit of excitement into your marketing campaign (“What marketing campaign?” you might be asking) have you thought about the way that funny business slogans can grab the attention of potential customers better than almost any other method?

The goal of marketing and advertising is to draw the attention–even for a second–of a general public that is oblivious to the existence of your business, and humor is one of the very best ways to accomplish this. Let’s face it, even in our everyday lives we have very little resistance to someone offering to tell us a joke or launching a funny line past us on the radio or in person. If done correctly a good strong business slogan blurs the line between advertising and entertainment. And lowering the amount of latent resistance that most people develop toward advertisements via a funny business slogan is a huge step in compelling them to that initial involvement with your company, brand and products.

Once you have their attention you have at least a fighting chance of converting them into customers because you’ve got your foot in their mental doorway, as it were. In theory it buys you a little more time to give them further information to transform semi-resistant “attention” into something more like receptivity, where they hopefully will begin to ask you the questions.

If we define the best business slogans as the ones that come most easily to mind, then certainly funny slogans would be very high on the list. Sometimes by analyzing successful examples of something we can get a feeling for just what makes it excellent, and here’s a short list of business slogan ideas that might inspire you to come up with one of your own for your business. It’s clear that no slogan generator was behind excellence like these business taglines.

Remember that if you or a witty friend hits upon a funny slogan that you feel will work for your company, but turns out to be a dud, you can easily adopt a new motto. After all some large companies do this on purpose every year to keep their marketing campaigns fresh. The last thing you want is for people to get bored with your business slogan and in effect tune it out.

Muffler repair shop: “No appointment necessary. We hear you coming.”

Business quotes for plumbing businesses seem to almost write themselves: “We repair what your husband fixed.” Or, “A royal flush beats a full house!”

One of the best funny business slogans ever, that may or may not have been used in real life, is from the Saturday Night Live ‘Sofa King’ skit (this is a bit raunchy!): Read the rest of this entry »

Whether we call them business mottoes, business taglines or verbal business logos, business slogans are instrumental in the branding and marketing campaigns of companies of every size. In a way they attempt to be shortcuts to successful marketing because they are created with the intention of carrying the entire thrust of a product or a company, in just a few words or even less. The good news is that by analyzing famous business slogans we can learn how to pick an advertising phrase that will establish a strong marketing presence. Even if you use a slogan generator for ideas, you’ll need a basis for what constitutes excellent.

The reason these commercial memes are so indispensable comes down to two primary factors. First, the attention span of potential customers for whom the advertising campaign is being run in the first place has become so short, as a result of ubiquitous media and the clamoring of attendant ads, that it is imperative to capture attention in seconds or less, regardless of the media employed to do so. A short, catchy slogan is necessarily created to cut through the ambient tsunami of media hype. Unsurprisingly then, business slogans of this kind is a perfect example of “less is more”; clearly longer slogans are at a disadvantage, everything else being equal, because the ‘catchy-ness’ of a short phrase loses impact after maybe six or seven words.

In addition to essentially catering to the shorter attention spans of consumers today, short slogans for your business work well within the media used to deliver them. Print advertising, whether magazine or newspaper, is built on quickly garnering attention from readers as they literally flip through pages. It goes without saying that most advertisements, if they were more than a line or two, would be futile efforts at conveying the message that a company hopes to promulgate, as the readers’ physical act of moving quickly on to the next page would render that message skipped over, in a literal sense.

Theories about what makes for powerful advertising slogans are one thing, but much becomes clearer when you look at what really works with slogan ideas. As much as anything slogans are about ‘feel’ and probably are created by copywriters in an intuitive place where language is used less in a literal way than to make contact with a deeper sensibility. Here is an absolutely classic (ahem) business slogan example: Read the rest of this entry »

In the earliest days of modern marketing, business slogans have been a way for businesses to communicate relatively complicated ideas through a short, memorable phrases. The idea could apply to a particular product that a business sells, and it certainly could apply to a company itself. A business slogan is a way to for companies to distill the complexity of their business enterprise into a simple idea, so that customers both current and potential have an image to which they might respond positively, an attractive concept used to supplement its goods, an electric abstraction layered over the concrete and mundane, to inspire buyers to action and to remain aware of the company and its products.

When we hear catchy slogans we might assume that a person walked into work one morning at an ad agency and simply dreamed up half a dozen slogan ideas that perfectly described a client or its product, but it’s exceedingly unlikely that that was the case. Although some of the best business taglines and business mottos are little gems of simplicity and engagement, in all likelihood it took a team of people weeks or more to cull the very best verbal business logo from a long slogans list. A slogan generator is most likely insufficient to come up with real excellence.

How about a few famous business slogans examples? Some of the very best have seeped into our cultural collective consciousness, so that they transcend even the businesses for which they were created. When this happens, a company can become the stuff of legend, its slogan or business motto taking on a almost mythical significance.

Just do it

It’s hard to think of many shorter slogans that still function as meaningful business quotes, but the brevity of these three words provides impact that is matched by very few slogans for business of the last few decades. Just do it communicates an attitude and a corporate image that is absolutely seductive, playing as it does upon our capacity for ambition and will to strive. In conjunction with the familiar famous faces of athletes with which even non-athletes are familiar and hold in high regard, Just do it ranks with the best business slogans ever created.

Think

IBM adopted this single word as a slogan for its business decades ago. Early in the twentieth century, as new marvels of  technology were making their way into the lives of ordinary consumers, the means to this wave of new invention-at the most basic level, thinking-was elevated such that the culture held it in almost holy esteem. As a catchy business slogan, Think is Read the rest of this entry »

As a small business owner you recognize the importance of distilling the leading edge of your marketing campaigns and other small business promotion efforts down to a really memorable, special phrase. Business slogans receive prime placement on all of your marketing materials, such as signage, print advertising, giveaway items such as T-shirts and hats, and all of your online marketing efforts as well. As much money and time as ads cost you it is critical that you choose a phrase worthy of your company: you need a spectacular business tagline, as it does a disproportionate amount of work in establishing a brand for your small business advertising.

I want to share a secret for determining with specificity just how effective different company slogans might be in grabbing attention of people who are focused on something else when they read it. A slogan’s function is new customer acquisition after all, which is a fancy way of saying that you’re trying to convert people with no knowledge of your business or products you sell, into customers, or at least establish a foothold for your business in their minds. Discovering how catchy a slogan really is through testing is a way to avoid wasting time and effort on small business advertising ideas that don’t work.

A Google Adwords campaign can be run for very little money, as little as $25 if you are very cost-conscious, and it is an excellent way to gauge response to any phrase very quickly. When you have four or five slogan ideas that you would like to test, you simply sign up for Adwords and in just a day or two you’ll have hard data on what percentage of people who were served each ad clicked on it. Your two-line text ads appear on contextually-relevant pages as determined by Google in the sidebar of sites whose owners have Adsense installed, and Google sites such as Gmail and YouTube. If someone clicks on one of your ads you can take them to your company’s website, but you are less interested in driving traffic in this case than you are the statistics regarding your ad conversion rate, with which Google will supply you.

Having done this myself I can tell you that the results are often surprising. An ad that I thought might be clicked on 10% of the time might actually only convert 1% of the time or even less. The point is that you can quickly eliminate from consideration slogans featuring text ads that get very little response; that attention-grabbing capability is exactly what you are testing here.

When you use this method to test how catchy a business slogan is you only pay when someone clicks on an ad, so you can be assured that when your initial $25 advertising budget is depleted you will have actionable data. You will probably eliminate a few slogans and then refine the phrases that appear to be promising based on your initial testing.

When you consider the cost of this method relative to simply guessing how effective business slogans might be, you can see how far $100 could go in narrowing down your choices so that you end up with a slogan in which you can have confidence. Your small business marketing strategy will rely so heavily on your slogan that testing like this is a small price to pay to ensure that your slogan converts.

Free business slogans are very simple to create using any slogan generator that you can easily find on the Internet. All you have to do is type in the sort of business your company is engaged in and the software will very quickly create a short tagline for your business that aims to be catchy and noteworthy. You can very easily create dozens of slogans using this method, sample business sayings that may or may not be what you’re looking for will at least be presented to you and who knows, one of them may fit your business perfectly.

Remember to though, that it may be easier than you think to make your own company slogan, because believe it or not you have a wonderful resource waiting for you simply in the form of friends and relatives who have the “gift of gab”. Remember that it only takes one inspired phrase to result in a catchy slogan idea that you can use for many years. You have no idea from whom this inspiration might come so I would contend that the very best way to find free business slogans is by mining the fertile brains of the wittiest and most garrulous people that you know.

Hey you could even make a party out of it! Just write down on a large sheet of paper or a poster board your business name and product or service that you are engaged in selling. Give everybody a pen and get to work. Who knows, if the party really gets going people might start blurting out funny business slogans worthy of major advertising firms. We have all been bombarded by verbal business logos in advertising of every form during our entire lives so people are better at coming up with these short business catchphrases than they might think they are.

Free association is your friend here. One way to approach this task is to intertwine an abstraction with whatever your physical business is. Think of the most famous business slogans, from Microsoft: “Where you want to go today?” The connotation here is freedom and personal control, but the slogan was really meant to emphasize all the things you could do with Microsoft’s products. Combining a few words that fit your particular business with positive imagery to which people are attracted generally, is one way to zero in on a slogan that is appropriate for your business. It might be helpful to read out some other famous business slogans examples to get help everybody get their creativity hats on.

You absolutely should still use free Read the rest of this entry »