“Just Do It.” “Snap. Crackle. Pop.” “Great Taste…Less Filling.” “Built Ford Tough”. The wonderful world of taglines.
Recently, Chevrolet opted out of the tagline business. They had been using “An American Revolution” since 2003.
You may remember that it was launched on Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New
Year’s Eve program with a spot produced by Hollywood director Michael
Bay featuring the song “Magic Carpet Ride” by Steppenwolf and showing a
covered car carrier moving through the country. As the Director of
Marketing and Communications at DaimlerChrysler at the time, I remember
it really well because it was, well…really good.
It was
good for a lot of reasons. The music was classic rock, there was a
build-up of anticipation to know what was under the covers, and the
tagline was catchy. It was memorable and arguably ownable because of
Chevy’s deep correlation with “all-American” (American as Chevrolet and
apple pie). It also had some attitude and conjured up a sense of pride,
even though I was trying to beat them. And for the next 7 years, they
used it consistently — though not always with the same quality of
execution.
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Just last week I learned that they decided to drop it without a
replacement. Instead they will just use the brand names as the tagline.
“There’s not really an all-new theme,” Chevy General Manager Jim
Campbell told Automotive News. “It’s really communications focused at those target customers.”
Do Taglines Matter?
So, the big question is whether taglines really matter or not.
I would argue that they do. When you read the first four taglines at
the beginning of this entry, I would guess that every single one of you
thought of the brands they represented (OK, so maybe the Ford Tough was
a bit obvious, but you get my point).
Not only that, I will venture that each evoked an immediate sense of
the brand: good, bad, ugly, tasty, whatever. Good taglines do that.
I have had quite a bit of experience with taglines in my career,
particularly automotive. When I was at Ford working on the initial
Focus campaign, we had a great time with slogans for outdoor postings.
We were trying to be a bit edgy and definitely youthful so the postings
were pieces of artwork done in a very graffiti-like fashion with large
print on them. They said things like “Power without Focus is just Wasted Energy” or “Sound without Focus is just Noise”.
The lawyers HATED this because of course we were using the brand
name as a noun that could be construed as something other than the car
itself, making it hard to defend the brand name. But I tell this story,
even though it is not about a tagline, only because it helps give a
glimpse into the extraordinary difficulty of finding a line that passes
muster internally — much less passes the tests of a good tagline.
Some key traits of a solid tagline include memorability, unaided
recall (closely linked to memorability), simplicity (the fewer words
the better), longevity (relevant for decades to come), ownable (you
can’t put a competitors brand name in there and have it work as well),
benefit (shows some trait of the brand), and attitude/spirit of the
brand (enough said).
I can think of very few lines that do ALL of these things but there
are those that come pretty close. There was a survey done a few years
back that ranked the hits and misses of automotive taglines of the
time. It is kind of sad to look at it now: most of those taglines are
no longer around.
Hits. They reinforce the core brand, so they’re tops:
- BMW – “The Ultimate Driving Machine”
- Chevrolet – “Like A Rock”
- Mini – “Let’s Motor”
- Volvo – “For Life”
- GMC – “Professional Grade”
- Dodge – “Ram Tough”/”Grab Life by the Horns”
Misses. They may be cute, but say little about brand identity or reputation:
- Nissan – “Dogs Love Trucks”
- Nissan – “Shift 2.0”
- VW – “Make Friends with Your Fast” followed immediately by “Safe Happens”
- Buick – “Beyond Precision”
- Oldsmobile – “Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile”
Source: Stokefire Consulting Group, 2007
I was a little surprised that “Zoom Zoom Zoom” did not make it but I
was really psyched to read that Dodge made the “Hits” list because I
was responsible for that one. It was my third month at DaimlerChrysler
and we were about to reposition the Dodge brand (the previous tagline
was “Dodge. Different.”) and launch the new Ram.
The Inside Story Of Dodge’s “Grab Life By The Horns” Tagline
The agency, BBDO, and I were on a super tight deadline and we were
down to the wire. They came into the conference room with a stack of
flash cards and each had a tagline written on them.
They started to flip through them one by one just like my parents
used to do with me when I was learning my multiplication back in grade
school. When they came to “Grab Life by the Horns”, I read it and just
knew it was the one.
It had a visceral effect. I just knew it was right. It was
relatively short, memorable (in that it was a phrase used already by
people), it conveyed attitude and best of all, it was ownable in that
our logo for the brand that was stamped on every single vehicle had a
Ram’s head with the horns on it. Testing three years later showed us
that our unaided recall put this tagline 2nd in the auto category only
behind “Built Ford Tough” which had been around for decades. I contend
that this tagline, combined of course, with the new product, the
energized advertising, improved company efficiency, design and
engineering, and inspired dealer body helped us get to profitability
over the next two years.
Would we have gotten there without a tagline? Probably.
But each element of our efforts reinforced the next and that is why
I think that leaving out any element that can help to give the consumer
a sense of what you stand for, or how THEY can expect to feel when they
own your brand, is a missed opportunity.
At the same time, playing the game of revolving taglines can be more
harmful than helpful. Saturn had three different taglines in four
years. On the other hand, BMW has more or less stuck with “The Utlimate
Driving Machine” since around 1975. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist
to know that the longer you stick with a line, the better chance it has
of helping your message break through the clutter, particularly if it
is a good one. If you look at the lines I opened with, you know what I
mean.
Not only is it good for customers, it is also good for dealers.
Never underestimate the power of having your dealer body behind your
marketing efforts. Nothing can ruin your plans like having dealers feel
as though they were not included or considered in the development of a
new tagline. A disenfranchised dealer will choose to not only NOT use
your tagline or ads, but also to create their own. Nothing can cause
more brand confusion than an OEM and its dealer body who are
simultaneously broadcasting messages across all the mediums that are
not in sync or worse, conveying conflicting messages to customers.
From even a cursory search of the websites of various Chevy dealers
around the country, it’s clear that the dealer body is still using
“American Revolution” in their messaging. It will likely be months —
if not years — before we’ll see all Chevy dealers give up the tagline
as the corporation has.
Will Chevrolet lose sales over dropping the tagline? That will
remain to be seen. Without new cars that really grab people’s attention
and reinforce the idea, a tagline doesn’t do much good anyway. But I
had hoped that they would have continued with it because, in fact, GM
and Chevrolet really DO represent today’s automotive American
Revolution. I hope they win this war.