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A powerful tagline might well be the most powerful brand component of all.

Andrew Carrier

Sep 22, 2024

Read on to learn why:

① A good tagline distils your most important marketing message.

② The process of unearthing your tagline is valuable in itself.

③ The Alternative Investment Market needs urgent attention.

④ The UK has an opportunity to seize the lead in digital finance.

⑤ A distinctive logo trumps corporate synergy every time.

⑥ The absence of kindness is a management failure.

⑦ We should prioritise lifelong learning over formal qualifications.

📸 But first, flashback to last week when I told you that AI is overhyped, misunderstood, and underestimated. Well, this week, it emerged that CMOs are embracing AI despite the knowledge gap and 70% of marketers use it weekly.

What's new

The public has welcomed the return of John Lewis’ tagline, reports CityAM.

In short:

“After dropping its ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ pledge in February 2022 on the grounds that it lacked ‘relevance’ amid competition from Amazon and other e-commerce retailers, John Lewis announced that it was bringing the slogan back.”
“YouGov BrandIndex data shows that Buzz scores – which measure whether the public have heard anything positive or negative about a brand in the past two weeks – have doubled between 4 and 13 September, from 9.5 to 18.6 (+9.1).”
“This has corresponded with a boost to John Lewis’ Impression scores, which measure overall sentiment, and which jumped from 44.7 to 50.0 (+5.3) over the same period. It has also bolstered the department store chain’s already good Reputation scores, which measure whether consumers would be proud oo embarrassed to work for a particular brand. These have improved from 38.3 to 46.2 (+7.9). But the metric that may be most interesting to John Lewis – especially in an age of belt-tightening – may be Value for Money. These scores rose from 15.3 to 23.4 (+8.1) over the period in question.”

Why it matters

I confess, I hadn’t realised that John Lewis ever dropped the tagline in the first place so its return doesn’t feel like news to me. But that in itself is testimony to the power of a good tagline: my positive association with the brand survived two and a half years of its absence. And that’s why this story matters: it prompts us to think about what a tagline actually is and why a good one works so well.

① A tagline isn’t a vision, a mission, or a mantra. Those ‘expressions of intent’ have their place in marketing strategy and corporate culture but remain largely ignored by customers. A tagline is sharper than a value proposition and more compelling than a benefit statement. It doesn’t try to do it all. In fact a tagline does just one thing - perhaps the most important thing: it distils the one message you most want your customer to remember about you.

B2C marketers tend to be good at this, they instinctively understand that people need a clear message that articulates the essence of a brand. B2B marketers have a lesson to learn here. Whether you’re selling consumer goods or cross-border payment services, you should help your customers understand what you stand for.

What to do about it

Take action

② Can you articulate your tagline? It’s worth remembering, that the process of unearthing your tagline is valuable in itself, even if you chose not to externalise it. Think though these elements in order:

Your mission, vision or mantra are expressions of intent. They’re aspirational statements about your purpose, what matters to you as an organisation, why you exist beyond making a profit.
Your value proposition is chiefly about what sets you apart in the market. It articulates who you serve and how you help them but it’s really about why customers should choose you over the alternatives.
Your benefits are what ‘make it real’ for customers, they’re the answer to the ‘so what?’ question. What does a customer get from choosing your product? In what way will it improve their lives? (Hint: in B2B, there are only three types that matter: more revenue, lower costs, mitigated risk.)
Your features are often confused with benefits. They’ve very different. They’re actually the how to the benefit’s what.

Your tagline comes from all of this. When you’ve documented 1 through 4, when you’ve considered market research, when you’ve spoken to as many of your current customers as you can about what they value about you, ask yourself: what’s the one thing I’d like a customer to remember about my brand? Now distill that to as few words as possible. A good tagline is short, memorable and relevant. It’s devilishly hard to create and extraordinarily powerful.

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Top stories

The other articles that are worthy of your time.

FINANCE

London’s AIM is dying. Here’s how to fix it.

③ The Alternative Investment Market needs urgent attention.

“London’s Alternative Investment Market has had a rough few years. The number of companies on it has dwindled to just 610, down 88 from last year, and the rate shows no sign of stopping. While AIM companies have always been small, they’re also getting smaller. The average size of an AIM-listed firm is now just £111m, 11 per cent smaller than last year.”
“Investors have pulled billions of pounds from the junior market, leading to fewer companies floating and a sharp drop in fundraising. Performance has also been hit hard, with the AIM index falling 40 per cent over the last three years, compared to a 21 rise in the FTSE All Share and a one per cent rise for the FTSE Smallcap, excluding investment trusts.”
“Charles Hall, head of research at Peel Hunt, has proposed radical steps:
- using the government’s £5bn stake in Natwest to seed a National Wealth Fund that could invest in smaller UK companies, reducing IPO costs, or pushing for AIM companies to be included in index funds;
- a minimum of 0.5 per cent of all pension assets invested in the junior market, as well as pushing pension funds to invest more in the UK as a whole; and
- widening the scope of the British Business Bank, which currently invests around £4bn in private UK companies, to include listed equities.”

TECHNOLOGY

UK banks hail Regulated Liability Network experiments

④ The UK has an opportunity to seize the lead in digital finance.

“The UK RLN is envisaged as a common ‘platform for innovation’ across multiple forms of money, including existing commercial bank deposits and a shared ledger for tokenised commercial bank deposits.”
“Barclays, Citi, HSBC, Lloyds, Mastercard, NatWest, Nationwide, Santander, Standard Chartered, Virgin Money and Visa all took part in the experimentation phase over the summer.”
“Across the use cases explored, a number of potential benefits were discovered, including reducing fraud, improving efficiency in the process of home buying and reducing the cost of failed payments in the UK.”

Full disclosure: Quant is a technology partner to the RLN.

MEDIA & MARKETING

PayPal has a new logo that makes it look just like everything else

⑤ A distinctive logo trumps corporate synergy every time.

“Roughly 25 years after it launched payment processing, PayPal is ‘ushering in a new era for customers’ with some generic black text. The company has a new logo, designed by Pentagram, that looks incredibly plain — especially compared to previous iterations of the logo that featured a rakish slant, two shades of blue, and prominent PayPal P’s.”
“The company justifies the change by saying that the new black standalone wordmark won’t be confused with the rest of the payments processing world — especially ‘the blue that has become synonymous with fintech’.”
“It joins the fine tradition of flattening logos just for the sake of them being flat and inserting weird corporate synergy for some reason. Here, that synergy is actually accomplished only when PayPal chooses to use colors alongside the wordmark: ‘Bright blue and deep blue overlap to reveal Venmo blue,’ writes Pentagram.”

WILDCARD

Should you be nice at work?

⑥ The absence of kindness is a management failure.

Source: The Economist, 19 September 2024

“A recent meta-analysis of research into niceness and effective leadership concludes that the two do often go together. Studies into bosses’ agreeableness, one of the ‘Big Five’ personality traits (along with openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism), have found that it is tied to ethical behaviour, workplace trust and psychological safety, among other beneficial things.”
“Agreeableness is not the only trait that matters for a boss: a delightful but highly neurotic person may struggle in stressful situations. Employees vary too: some people care less about empathy and more about money. There are moments—when employees have suffered a personal trauma, for example—when warmth is the most important test of a company’s character. But in other circumstances, different traits matter.”
“Different industries attract leaders with varying personality types: bosses in the financial-services industry are comparatively less agreeable, for example, than those who work in health care. Kindness may also count for less in negotiation-heavy roles like sales.”

Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

The last word

⑦ Michael Mainelli, Lord Mayor of the City of London, on the City’s over-reliance on qualifications:

Michael Mainelli. Source: The Financial Times. 9 June 2022

“We are all born polymaths, interested in everything. The challenge is to harness that eagerness to discover and be curious, funnelling it into a system that encourages and supports genuine lifelong learning.”

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Strive for InMarketing.

Wishing you a productive week,

P.S. Pondering Sunday lunch? I can report The Palomar is as good as ever.