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The Tagline Brief: A One-Page Template

August 15, 20263 min readprocess

A fill-in brief that makes tagline writing tractable: audience, difference, feeling, constraints, placements and banned words, with a worked example.

Bad taglines are usually written before anyone decided what the line was for. The writing session starts with a blank page, the blank page produces free association, and free association produces the same forty candidates every business generates: something with quality, something with trust, a pun, and a rhyme. A brief prevents this — not by inspiring better lines, but by making bad ones detectable on sight.

One page is the discipline. If the brief runs longer, it has become a strategy document, and strategy documents do not fit under logos. Here are the six boxes, in the order they should be argued about.

The six boxes

1. Audience — one sentence, one person. Not a demographic: a situation. "A homeowner whose boiler died this morning" writes a different line than "homeowners aged 30-65." If two audiences genuinely matter, pick which one the tagline serves; the other gets served elsewhere.
2. Difference — the completed sentence. Finish "We're the ones who…" with something true and checkable. This box is the hard one, and it cannot be skipped: a brief with an empty difference box is an instruction to write decoration.
3. Feeling — one word, chosen from a shortlist you'd defend. Relieved? Confident? Looked after? The feeling constrains vocabulary and rhythm. "Reassured" bans exclamation marks all by itself.
4. Constraints — the mechanical rules. Maximum characters (set by your tightest placement, not your favourite one), reading level, whether the business name appears in the line, legal words you must or must not use.
5. Placements — where the line will actually live. Rank them. A line for a van is written differently than a line for a website hero, and the top-ranked placement wins ties.
6. Banned words — the category sludge. List the words every competitor uses, and forbid them. For most trades this starts: quality, trusted, professional, solutions, passionate, excellence. The ban is crude and it works.

A worked example

The business: a small accountancy practice that specialises in freelancers and one-person companies. The brief, filled in: Audience — a freelance designer three weeks from a tax deadline, doing invoices at midnight. Difference — we only serve one-person businesses, so everything is built for someone with no finance department. Feeling — relieved. Constraints — under 40 characters; no jargon; must work spoken aloud. Placements — website hero first, email signature second. Banned — solutions, proactive, bespoke, trusted advisor.

Watch the brief do its work. The first line states the difference box almost verbatim — that is common, and a sign the box was well filled. The second dramatises it. The third is the feeling box distilled to two words; it needs the hero placement to land, which the placement ranking permits. The fourth violates the banned list four times in six words, which is precisely why the banned list exists: nobody defends that line once the brief is on the table.

Using it without ceremony

This does not need a workshop. A sole trader can fill the page in twenty minutes at a kitchen table, and the twenty minutes still pays, because the brief's real product is not the writing it inspires — it is the rejections it makes obvious. Candidates get tested against boxes instead of tastes. "I like it" stops being an argument, and "it fails box four" starts being one. That single shift is worth more than any technique for generating lines, because generating lines was never the scarce skill. Judging them is.