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Why Committees Kill Good Taglines

August 16, 20263 min readprocess

Group approval selects for the line nobody objects to, which is rarely the line anybody remembers. The decision structure that avoids the blender.

No committee ever wrote "Just do it." A committee would have flagged it as vague, legally reviewed the imperative, asked what it refers to, and shipped "Achieve your athletic potential" instead. This is not because committees contain fools. It is because of what averaging does to edges.

A strong tagline is strong because it commits: to one claim, one audience, one register. Commitment produces objections — a sharp line always gives somebody something to dislike. Put five reasonable people in a room with veto power, and every distinctive candidate collects at least one veto, while the line that offends no one survives. The process does not select for the best line. It selects for the least objectionable one, and least objectionable is a synonym for forgettable.

The mechanics of the blender

Watch what actually happens in the meeting. Someone worries the sharp line excludes a customer segment — true, by design, and now softened. Someone wants their department's work reflected — one clause added. Legal prefers helps to makes. Each edit is individually defensible, and the sum is a line with no edges left. The room's most senior person's mild preference quietly outweighs the writer's strong one. And because everyone contributed, everyone approves the result, which feels like consensus and is actually diffusion of responsibility for a weak outcome.

The first line is a writer's line: specific, slightly odd, an image you keep. The fourth is what it becomes after four rounds of accommodation — family added for warmth, quality for reassurance, crafted for the artisan segment, the night deleted because one attendee found it faintly sinister. Every word survived a meeting. The line did not.

The structure that works instead

1. Consult the group on the brief, not the lines. Everyone's knowledge belongs in the boxes — audience, difference, banned words. Get the arguments out before writing, where they make the work better instead of blunter.
2. One writer drafts, one owner decides. The decider is a named individual with taste and authority, not a vote. Committees can advise; they cannot choose.
3. Reviewers veto for facts, not feelings. Legal accuracy, factual truth, trademark conflicts — binary checks, stated as pass or fail. "I'd prefer something warmer" is recorded and does not bind.
4. Present finalists against the brief, not against each other's tastes. The question to the room is "does this fail any box?" — never "which do you like?"

What approval is for

None of this means input is worthless. Groups are excellent at catching what one writer misses — the double meaning in another language, the claim operations cannot keep, the word a competitor already owns. The distinction is between surfacing information and sanding the line. Structure the group to do the first and to be structurally incapable of the second.

A tagline chosen by one accountable person will sometimes be wrong, and it will at least be wrong distinctively — a real bet that teaches you something when it misses. A tagline averaged by committee is wrong reliably, in the specific way that never teaches anything: it was nobody's bet, so nobody learns. Choose your failure mode. Only one of them compounds.