The SloganLenz Blog
The Lens
Notes on slogans, taglines, and saying less.
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Taglines for Local Businesses
Geography is an asset most local businesses waste or overspend. When naming the town helps, when it limits you, and the line between local and parochial.
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The Two-Word Tagline
The shortest viable form has outsized appeal and a brutal failure rate. What has to be true for two words to work, and why most are abstractions in disguise.
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Stress-Testing a Tagline Against Bad Reviews
Your tagline will one day be read by a furious customer. Which promises become ammunition, and how to write a line you can still stand behind that day.
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Descriptive vs Evocative Taglines
Lines that explain versus lines that suggest: the real tradeoff between them, why new businesses usually need the former, and when to switch.
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How to Brief a Designer on Your Tagline
The line is chosen; now it has to survive typesetting. Character counts, worst-case placements, line breaks and tone — what your designer needs in writing.
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Taglines That Age Badly
Slang, technology references, cultural moments and superlatives: the four patterns with a short shelf life, and how to date-proof a line before it ships.
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Concrete Nouns Beat Abstract Ones
The most reliable line-level edit there is: swap abstractions for things you could photograph. Before-and-afters, and why the trade almost always pays.
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Why Committees Kill Good Taglines
Group approval selects for the line nobody objects to, which is rarely the line anybody remembers. The decision structure that avoids the blender.
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The Tagline Brief: A One-Page Template
A fill-in brief that makes tagline writing tractable: audience, difference, feeling, constraints, placements and banned words, with a worked example.
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Writing Taglines in a Second Language
Why literal translation of a good line usually fails: idiom, false friends, and sound that does not travel. What to do instead of translating.
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How Often Should You Change Your Tagline?
Recognition compounds and churn resets it. The signals that it is genuinely time to change your line, the false alarms, and what a change actually costs.
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Taglines for Businesses With No Obvious Differentiator
What to write when the honest answer is "we do what everyone else does." Finding a real angle in service, hours, geography or manner — without inventing one.
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What a Slogan Can't Fix
Positioning problems, pricing problems and product problems all look like copy problems from the inside. How to tell which one you actually have.
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The Case Against Puns
The pun deserves a fair trial before the verdict. When a pun is genuinely the right call, and the far more common ways it quietly dates a business.
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Reading the Room: Taglines for Serious Categories
Funeral homes, legal aid, debt advice: categories where the standard playful advice fails. What replaces cleverness when the customer is having a bad day.
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How to Rename a Business Without Losing Customers
Renaming is a logistics problem wearing a creative costume. The sequencing, the overlap period, and what to tell existing customers — in the right order.
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Rhyme, Alliteration and When Sound Tricks Backfire
Sound devices make lines stick — and can make a business sound like a child's menu. When rhyme and alliteration help, and the tests that catch the misfires.
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Where to Put Your Tagline (and Where Not To)
Placement changes what a tagline has to do. The spots that earn their keep, the spots that change the brief, and the places a line actively hurts.
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How Long Should a Slogan Be?
There is no magic word count, but there are real constraints — breath, signage, and the size of the gap you are asking a reader to close.
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Using AI for Slogans Without Sounding Like AI
Generated taglines have a recognisable smell. Where it comes from, how to spot it in your own shortlist, and how to use the tool without inheriting it.
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How to Write a Premise That Gets Good Slogans
The quality of a generated tagline is capped by the brief you gave it. Four things to put in a premise, and the vague words that quietly ruin one.
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Check This Before You Print the Slogan
A tagline being original doesn't mean it's available. What to search before you put a line on signage, and where the real risk sits for a small business.
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How to Test a Slogan Before You Commit
Asking people whether they like your tagline tells you almost nothing. Six tests that produce a usable answer, none of which need a research budget.
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Nine Slogan Formulas That Keep Working
Patterns that show up again and again in taglines that stick — what each one does, when it fits, and the way each one fails.
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Why Your Slogan Sounds Generic
Generic taglines are not caused by a lack of creativity. They are caused by a brief that never named anyone. Five specific causes, and the fix for each.
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Slogan vs Tagline vs Mission Statement
Three things that get used interchangeably and shouldn't. What each one is for, who reads it, and how long each is supposed to last.
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What Actually Makes a Slogan Work
Most slogan advice is a list of adjectives. Here are the four things a tagline has to do, and how to tell whether yours does any of them.
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