SloganLenz › The Lens

Why Your Slogan Sounds Generic

June 24, 20263 min readwriting

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.

Nobody sets out to write "Quality You Can Trust". It arrives on its own, at the end of a long afternoon, as the least objectionable thing left standing. Generic is not what you chose — it is what survives when nothing sharper was allowed through.

There are a handful of reliable causes, and they are all upstream of the writing.

1. The brief never named a person

"A cleaning service" produces cleaning-service lines. "A cleaning service for people moving out of a rental who need the deposit back" produces something nobody else can use. The specificity of the output is capped by the specificity of the input.

The fix costs one sentence: before writing anything, describe your customer in a way that excludes someone. If the description fits everybody, keep narrowing until it does not.

2. Everyone had veto power

A line that has to clear five people acquires a scar from each of them. The sharp edge that made it interesting is exactly the edge someone will object to, and objections feel more legitimate than enthusiasm in a meeting.

The fix is procedural. Let a group generate and a single person decide. Committees are excellent at eliminating risk and terrible at choosing.

3. You wrote about the category, not the business

Category language is comfortable because it is obviously true. Dentists talk about smiles. Accountants talk about peace of mind. Gyms talk about your best self. It is all accurate and none of it distinguishes.

The fix: list the ten words your entire industry uses in its marketing, then ban them for an hour. What you write in that hour will be worse on average and better at the top.

4. You optimised for approval instead of memory

Lines that everyone likes and nobody remembers are the default outcome of asking "does anyone object?" A better question is "can you say it back to me tomorrow?" Those two questions select for opposite things, and only one of them matters after launch.

5. You stopped at the first workable option

The first ten lines are almost always the obvious ones — they are obvious because they arrive first. The interesting territory starts around line fifteen, when the easy angles are used up and you are forced somewhere less comfortable.

This is the cheapest fix of the five: keep going past the point where it stops being fun. Quantity is not a substitute for judgment, but it is a prerequisite for having anything worth judging.

The one-minute diagnosis

1. Could a competitor use this line unchanged? Then the brief was too vague.
2. Did more than one person have to approve it? Then it was sanded down.
3. Does it use words your whole industry uses? Then it is category language.
4. Did anyone ask whether it was memorable, or only whether it was fine? Then it was optimised for approval.
5. Was it in the first ten you wrote? Then you probably stopped too early.

Most generic taglines fail at least three of these. The good news is that all five are fixable before you write a single word — which is where the fixing has to happen.