Of headlines and tag lines

The headline and the tagline are the ‘top and tail’ of your advert. They are the opening move and the grand finale of your attempt to tell a story that successfully sells. They are equally important. The headline sucks the reader in and tempts them to read more, whilst the tagline is the last thought that you leave with them, it is the ‘seed’ that everything in the advert that precedes it has been ‘preparing the ground’ for the planting of.

The ad referenced here has a very strong tagline – “Banking on Women” – but quite a weak headline – “Unique as you are” – which to me doesn’t say very much about that which is being sold, plus ‘womanhood’ is only unique in so far as half the world’s population are ‘unique’.

One of the challenges that you will often come across as a copy-writer is where in your ad to place/use your ‘killer-line’. In other words you will often be torn between the desire to blast it ‘loud and proud’ as your headline, and thus grab a bit of attention and sell hard up front, and the understanding that what your line actually does is capture the essence of the brand, and as such should be held-back and used only as the final ‘killer’ blow.

By way of a rule, I would say that the best way to distinguish and differentiate between what is a headline and what is a tagline in your mind would be on the basis of the function of each, with primary function of the headline being to grab the attention, and the primary function of the tagline being to position the brand.

When I write ads, I (almost) always write from the tagline backwards. The tagline is the conclusion of the story. In the case of this ad, therefore, the story needs to be constructed as follows: “Headline… blah blah blah blah blah… and therefore, KWFT, Banking on Women”

N.B. I will come back to this, but one of the reasons that it is so hard to write ads for poorly positioned brands i.e. brands with nothing or nonsensical taglines is that it is impossible to logically draw the conclusion on the basis of the product and service offering that the tagline is suggesting.

Tag-lines are often treated as rather throw-away entities. There’s many a brand that would appear to have one simply for the sake of having one. This is almost always a mistake, and it is indeed better to have no tagline than a tagline that says something but means nothing. Remember that these few little words next to your logo will, purely by the power of repetition, begin to embed themselves in the collective mind as being the ‘definitive’ definition of who your brand is and what it stands for – after all if you declare to the world that you are ‘XYZ”, who is the world to argue with you?

By way of an illustration of the point above I am reminded of the primary school girl who, when asked to tell the school’s distinguished guests from Safaricom what Safaricom’s slogan was, replied with a straight face “Terms & Conditions Apply!”

To my mind the one time that your tagline can perhaps become your headline is when you are running a ‘brand campaign’ i.e. when the primary focus of your communication is to build a particular position for your brand. If this is the case there is no ‘sales story’ per se, and thus the conclusion can also be the introduction, though this is by no means the only way to approach a brand positioning campaign – can you extend the tagline, a la ‘Niko na this, Niko na that, Niko na Safaricom…’

Writing a tagline for a brand, giving it a slogan or a motto, distilling everything that it stands for, all it’s hopes and dreams and plans and strengths, into three, four or five short words is one of the hardest jobs in the game. It is also the job that perhaps deserves more care or attention than any other.

To hammer this point home, I would ask you to spend just 10 minutes writing a slogan or tagline for yourself. Remember that everytime anyone ever interacts with you the last thing that they will hear or see is your shiny new tagline, and that whatever it says is what they will begin to believe over time about you (unless of course it is manifestly fake, as in ‘Tall dark and handsome” when you are actually five foot nothing with no front teeth).

When you conduct this exercise you will quickly understand how important it is to get your tagline right, in other words how important it is to get your core brand position right, for your tagline is simply the external expression, in words, of this position.

Remember that in the marketplace your brand position has to be competitive and distinctive. If you are a footballer and you come up with the tagline “Good right foot” the chances are that you won’t make it much past Ligi Ndogo. If however you should declare to the world that you “Pierce any defence with laser-like passing” then the chances of Sir Alex paying attention are much higher, especially given the present state of Paul Scholes’ legs…

Very often in the ad game you will find yourself struggling to come up with a way to sell a product or service because the brand behind the product or service lacks a clear position. If you take this KWFT example the strong tagline – “Banking on Women” – means that writing ads for them should actually be quite simple – all you have to do is demonstrate how every single product or service proves that they are ‘banking on women’.

There are essentially only two types of companies that you will come across in the ad game: those who’s mission it is to make money and those who make money as a means towards achieving their mission. The former are commercial enterprises, the latter are the stuff of which true brands are made. Interestingly enough, it is the latter who tend to make more money in the long run.