16th Sep 2010
Business Slogans Examples and Analysis
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 entirely appropriate for a time at the beginning of the computer era, along with the space race and the military-industrial complex generally. Remember that for many years IBM was the juggernaut on the cutting edge of various areas of this tech development vis-à-vis computers, and the impact of this single word as its slogan (coined as legend has it by Thomas Watson, IBM’s first CEO) is hard to overstate. As IBM’s website states today, in the most basic way, the defining value at IBM has been the way they think, as opposed to their assets or size. This slogan is an example of how an entire corporate culture and intention can be conveyed in one single impactful word.
Think different
It would be appropriate now to mention the slogan of possibly the most innovative company of the last 10 or 15 years, Apple, because you can be sure that as interesting as this logo is on so many levels, it is also somehow aspires to be an extension of the ‘think’-ing of the old order (i.e. IBM) for a company whose new (returning) CEO, Steve Jobs, wanted for his company for the dawn of the new millennium. The logo echoes, affirms and extends the IBM slogan in a brilliant, economical two words.
With all the complexity and noise within which consumers make decisions nowadays, it is more vital than ever for companies to reach people using concise and hard-hitting language. Business slogans are on the frontline of the efforts of all companies’ marketing campaigns to bridge the gap between themselves and their customers, new and old, and perpetuate a basic message, the conveyance of which is essential to the company’s survival.
[...] 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: [...]
[...] 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 [...]