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What Actually Makes a Slogan Work

June 10, 20263 min readfundamentals

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.

Ask ten people what makes a good slogan and you will get ten adjectives. Memorable. Punchy. Catchy. None of those are instructions. You cannot sit down and write something catchy any more than you can sit down and write something beloved.

It helps more to ask what the line has to do. A slogan is a small piece of infrastructure. It has a job, and the job has parts.

It has to be about you specifically

The single most common failure is a line that would work equally well for a competitor. If you can swap your name out, drop a rival's in, and nothing breaks, the line is not doing any work. It is decoration.

Test it directly. Write your slogan down, then write it again with the name of the business across the street. If both versions are equally true, throw it out.

The last line in that set is the swappable one. It is not wrong. It is just not about anyone.

It has to survive being said out loud

Slogans get spoken far more than they get read. Someone describes you to a friend. Someone answers the phone. Someone reads it off a van at a stoplight. A line that only works in a specific typeface, at a specific size, with a specific line break, is a design element rather than a slogan.

Read yours aloud, at speed, twice. If you stumble, so will everyone else. Watch for consonant pileups, three-syllable words in the stressed position, and anything requiring a pause you cannot punctuate.

It has to leave something unsaid

The lines people repeat tend to have a small gap in them — an implication the listener completes themselves. That act of completion is what makes a line feel clever rather than merely accurate, and it is why the most literal option is rarely the most repeatable.

This is also the easiest thing to overdo. A gap the reader cannot close is not intrigue, it is confusion. The line should be solvable in about a second, by someone who knows nothing about you beyond the context they are seeing it in.

It has to be true enough to survive contact

A slogan is a promise the rest of the business has to keep. Claim speed and be slow, and the line stops being an asset and becomes a stick people hit you with in reviews. The strongest taglines are the ones a customer would still nod at after the experience, not just before it.

This is the part no writing exercise can fix. If the line is aspirational rather than descriptive, you are not writing a slogan — you are writing a goal, and you should say so internally and pick something honest for the public.

How to use the four together

1. Write far more options than you need. Twenty is a reasonable floor, and most of them should be bad.
2. Kill everything that survives the competitor swap.
3. Read what remains out loud and kill anything you stumble on.
4. Of the survivors, keep the ones with a small gap in them.
5. Of those, keep only the ones you could defend to an unhappy customer.

What is left is usually one to three lines. That is the right number to sit with for a week before committing, because the fifth test is time, and no framework substitutes for it.