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How to Write a Premise That Gets Good Slogans

July 22, 20262 min readprocess

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.

People blame the output. Usually the problem is the input. "A coffee shop" is not a brief — it is a category, and a category can only produce category lines.

A good premise is not longer for the sake of it. It is longer in four specific places.

1. Who it is for, stated narrowly enough to exclude someone

This is the highest-leverage sentence you can write. "People" produces nothing. "Nurses coming off a night shift" produces lines nobody else could use, because it hands over a whole world of associated detail — time of day, exhaustion, routine, the specific relief of the first sip.

If your audience description would fit the business across the street, keep narrowing it.

2. What makes it different, in plain language

Not your values. The actual operational difference: you are open at 4am, you only take dogs other groomers refuse, you do not take walk-ins. Concrete differences generate concrete lines.

If nothing comes to mind, that is worth knowing before you commission signage. A business with no articulable difference will get generic slogans because it has a generic position, and no amount of wordsmithing fixes that.

3. The feeling you want on the other side

Relief is a different brief from excitement, which is a different brief from confidence. Naming the target feeling steers register more efficiently than any adjective about the business itself.

4. What to avoid

Cheap to write, disproportionately useful. If you never want to see a pun, or the word journey, or anything that sounds like a hospital, say so. Every constraint removes a whole region of obvious output.

Before and after

Now the same business, briefed properly: a drive-through espresso bar next to a hospital, mostly serving nurses at shift change, aiming for relief rather than energy, no puns.

Same coffee. The difference is entirely in the brief.

Words that quietly ruin a premise

• Quality, premium, professional — every business claims these, so they carry no information
• Innovative, cutting-edge, next-generation — category noise in almost every field
• Customers, clients, users — replace with the actual people
• Solutions — almost always deletable with no loss of meaning

Strip those out and you are usually left with a shorter premise carrying more signal. Then add the four things above, and you have a brief worth running.

One more pass

Before you run it, read your premise and ask whether a competitor could have written the identical paragraph. If they could, the slogans will be interchangeable too — and you will have learned something more useful than a tagline.