Steve Cone from Advertising Age published an interesting article last week entitled “Help taglines regain lost glory: why creating strong slogans is a marketer’s most important job.”

 

He says powerful taglines – what he calls “powerlines” are largely missing in action in today’s marketing messages. Cone believes this is a mistake because the right words “have the power to awe, inspire, motivate, alienate, subjugate and, in a marketing context, change the buying habits of consumers.”

 

He argues most consumer taglines “generally mean nothing or are relegated to small, unreadable type.” Cone also doesn’t like the fact most companies change their taglines every year or two, and sometimes within the same year. “Nothing could be more harmful to your brand and your business.”

 

The secret to creating a compelling tagline is attitude. Cone says “the brain is wired to seek the unusual phrase … and ignores phrases that seem ordinary and unimportant.” He also makes a compelling case for the power of sound, “Sound trumps sight by a wide margin in forcing the brain to remember something; you can’t turn off hearing.”

 

A current consumer powerline Cone likes is “Las Vegas: what happens here, stays here.”

 

• A diamond is forever (De Beers)
• Think small (VW)
• Just do it (Nike)
• You deserve a break today (McDonald’s)
• When it rains it pours (Morton Salt)
• You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s rye bread (Levy’s Baking)

• Snap! Crackle! Pop! (Rice Krispies)
• It’s the real thing (Coke)
• M’m M’m Good (Campbell's Soup)
• We try harder (Avis)
• We bring good things to life (GE)
• King of beers (Budweiser)
• For life (Volvo)
• It’s everywhere you want to be (Visa)
• The ultimate driving machine (BMW)
• When banks compete, you win (Lending Tree) 

Are taglines equally important in the world of B2B and technology? Is it more difficult to position a product that’s more complicated, or isn’t noticed/used by consumers?  

 

Yes and yes.

 

I’ve met with hundreds of business people over the past decade to discuss how to create focused messaging. 80 percent expressed a passion for “dumbing it down.” They really, really, really wanted to capture their product benefits in a catchy way. The business taglines they most frequently cited to make their point:  

 

If you believe taglines aren’t that critical for business, think again. They’ve never been more important.

 

Google never had a tagline until last year. Some people thought it was “Don’t be evil,” but that was their internal corporate motto. After a lot of introspection, they came up with: “Search, ads and apps.”

 

Salesforce.com had a pretty good tagline for years, “Experience Success.” But they changed it to “Success on demand.” They obviously care a lot about whether the new one is working because in January ‘08 they posted the following on their corporate blog:

 

“What do you think about the “success on demand” tagline? Is it memorable? Do you recall it when Salesforce.com is mentioned? Does it reflect who we are? Can it be improved?”

 

• Dude, you’ve got a Dell
• Easy as Dell
• Get more out of it now
• Purely You
• Yours is here (current tagline) 

As Dell relentlessly morphed its tagline, the company’s brand reputation was frequently barraged. The two went hand-in-hand.

 

Taglines are important because they exist to capture the essence and promise of a brand. When companies consistently struggle to articulate this most critical message, it’s often a symptom they have lost their way.

The #7 idea in next week’s Time cover story – “10 ideas that are changing the world” – is Synthetic Authenticity. “Promoting products as ‘authentic’ is serious business these days,” says Time writer John Cloud.

 

It’s also apparently a hot (or ‘kool?’) concept in some ad campaigns. Stoli Vodka headlines trumpet “Choose Authenticity.” Kool cigarettes urge people to “Be Authentic.”  Even the state of Maryland jumped into the fray, Cloud says, with its “Even the fun is authentic” promotion.

 

One thing’s for sure: you can’t have a true marketing movement without a gospel, a guiding tome, a clever book.

 

Enter Authenticity by James Gilmore and Joseph Pine. It inspired most of Time’s # 7 world changing notion. Ever read The Experience Economy during the Internet bubble? Gilmore and Pine wrote it. It introduced the notion of consumers being willing to pay a premium for “staged experiences” perceived as having inherent personal value. Think Starbucks.

 

In Authenticity, the authors believe the current “aura of inauthenticity around some brands is killing them.” The crucial factor dividing success from failure, Time interprets, “will be whether a business is perceived as real or fake, authentic or inauthentic.”

 

How should a company convey authenticity? Three ways, say the authors.

 

Approach # 1 involves companies being totally transparent and true to themselves and their claims. Think Chipotle Mexican Grill which only serves non-antibiotic meat. The challenge with Approach # 1, however, is that when you screw up (think Jet Blue stranding passengers for hours) your authentic company’s reputation gets nailed.

 

Approach # 2 involves openly faking it. Case in point: Verizon paying for product placement on the TV show “30 Rock” and Tina Fey eyeballing the camera when she says, “Can we have our money now?” This strategy is total tongue-in-cheek transparency. It says ‘I’m authentic because I’m openly fake.’     

 

Approach # 3 is to be “fake-real.” In this scenario, the company doesn’t have to be exactly what it says it is. The Canyon Ranch, a famous spa, isn’t really a ranch. The Daily Show isn’t a news show. Uh, okay.

 

Is this all a pile of crap or is there some nugget of validity?

 

Tom Asacker, author of A Clear eye for Branding, thinks authenticity is a “hollow cry.” He says “authenticity schmauthenticity!” To Asacker, it “smells of the marketing puffery we chide.” He continues, “What consumers really want is a good act. Like theatre goers, they want to suspend disbelief and ‘get lost’ in a well-crafted and well-executed brand experience – consistency, sincerity, and a perfectly attuned expression of their desires, sensibilities and identities.”    

 

Maybe it’s me, but isn’t Asacker saying the same thing as Gilmore and Pine?

 

Then again, doesn’t Gilmore and Pine’s new marketing doctrine remind you of their 1999 Experience Economy? Check this out: “Stop saying what your offerings are through advertising and start creating places – permanent or temporary, physical or virtual – where people can experience what those offerings, as well as your enterprise, actually are.” It wouldn’t be the first time a marketing guru re-spins one brilliant idea.

 

So, here’s the question for you? Does any of this authenticity stuff have validity for B2B technology companies?

 

If you’re a B2B technology company selling signaling hardware or voice response systems or high performance computers or enterprise software or virtualization solutions, is it important for “users” to feel authenticity from their vendor? Or do they just need a product that works and keeps rolling along, seamlessly delivering value? Should B2B companies create feeling experiences for their customers?   

 

You know what I think (or if you don’t, go here or here or here).

If a B2B company is in a commodity, price-driven market with lots of competitors sounding alike, one way it can differentiate is to invest some time and money making it a socially aligned business. This effort doesn't have to be the sole purpose of the company, but rather one genuine initiative among many.

Time’s John Cloud says, “People want their purchases to elevate them, to transform them. They want products to connect them to history or to a cause.”

Ditto for high level B2B decision makers who are increasingly saying, “Why not spend money with a company that has a great product and also cares about the world in which it competes?"

 

So allow me to introduce Authenticity Approach # 4: build great products, create trusted, high value partnerships with your customers and spend a little time and money helping others.

 

Let’s call it “Self-serving, genuine caring, B2B authenticity.”

 

 

I have to admit that the identity theft guy’s ad caught my attention. I’ve been way too promiscuous online, recklessly handing over my personal information to any web service that caught my fancy. The only place my online identity hasn’t been is Heidi Fleiss’ little black book.

So that got me wondering: do ads like these work? Do companies in which the owners have skin in the game come across as credible, or is it just personalized snake oil? Do these ads compel you to buy? I want to know. Vote up or down in the poll below. 

Andy Beaupre blogged in September that caring consistency is Apple’s #1 brand-building weapon.

 

Oprah’s performance last week in South Africa (read, watch) epitomized the principle. It was a tour de force of caring, and oh, what a brand she has built. Her press conference on the child abuse scandal that broke Nov. 5 at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls was an object lesson in crisis management. I never dreamed I could sympathize with a billionaire.

 

Rather than go underground with her legal team, she contacted authorities, launched her own investigation, looked students and parents in the eye, apologized, and laid everything she could out for the media – at the earliest possible opportunity.

 

The day the accused dorm mother appeared in court, Oprah stood at a podium flanked by local authorities and stared into the barrel of the global press corps. She detailed the timeline and the facts, starting with the first inkling of a problem. She was the first to utter the explosive words “sexual abuse.” She publicly acknowledged the gravity of the situation, accepted her share of responsibility as founder, took hard questions, and expressed true emotion: “This has been one of the most devastating, if not the most devastating experience, of my life.”

 

No stonewalling. None.

 

Oprah, who earns $260 million a year and has a net worth of $1.5 billion, made the kind of statements and took the kind of actions that would make any plaintiff’s lawyer drool. She had urged students to come forward if they’d been harmed. More girls had come forward, which under the circumstances, was good: “No one ever, ever abuses just one child,” she declared.

 

Oprah was more than accountable; she was inspiring. The debacle could have closed the school, snuffed out hope for its students, and emptied the talk show empress’s deep pockets. Whether it was spin, courage or both, her on-the-record statement was authentic:

 

“I’m happy for the attention because it is one of my goals in life to put child abusers, whether they be in my home, whether they be in my workplace, or in this case, in the academy, to put them where they belong. And that is behind bars.”

 

The students who came forward, she said, represent “the new generation of youth in South Africa who fearlessly take back their voices to speak up about their concern for their fellow classmates. This is really what we’re trying to teach.”

 

And if there was any doubt about her resolve in light of the crisis, she added: “I am prepared to do whatever is necessary to make sure that the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls becomes the safe, the nurturing and enriched setting that I had envisioned.”

 

This was refreshing, uplifting and rather straight talk (especially during presidential campaign season).

 

The Principled Profit blog hailed the appearance as a shining example of “How a Class Act Accepts Responsibility.”

 

All of this is in line with Oprah’s established (and quite credible) persona of caring consistency: This is how a beloved brand endures.

Sort of lost within Inside CRM’s “12 Effective strategies Apple uses to create loyal customers” at # 10 is “Consistency.”

 

Most of Apples’ brand-building strategies are dead obvious, like having a store just for Apple; the hipness factor they’ve created; seeding Apple within schools and universities, design attractiveness and, of course, innovation.

 

But their secret weapon just might be consistency.

 

As consumers, we instinctively “feel” product and service experiences and are smart enough to sense the real deal. We know – at a gut level - whether a company is telling the truth or scamming us. When a company does what it says it will do on a consistent basis, and delivers a satisfying product, then we become loyal to that brand over time. Screw this up and we start complaining and stop buying.

 

A great brand is built when a company dedicates itself to creating a product and service experience (more the former for Apple) that consistently meets people’s needs and expectations. Companies that try hard to listen, learn and continually improve, become the winners and gorillas of their industry. The others fall by the wayside, are marginalized or killed off.

 

This doesn’t mean companies can’t screw up. Apple has had plenty of problems over the years, from bad iPod drives to laptop battery issues to pricing screw-ups (iPhone). But through it all, they’ve listened to their customers and taken action – as quickly as possible most of the time – to right the wrong. They’re not perfect, but they’ve proven they are consistent in caring.

 

This caring consistency just might be the ultimate secret weapon in building Apple’s phenomenal brand loyalty. Maybe # 10 should be # 1.

Yesterday, a Business Intelligence Study from Pearlfinders (LINK), highlighted the differences between what marketing agencies say and what marketing decision makers actually want.

 

One of the major findings of the Pearlfinders research was the need for “better customer insights.” Marketing decision makers believe that “proximity to the mind of the customer is critical.” They don’t think we (marketing agencies) are doing as good a job in this arena as we should.

 

Most of us have been involved in different types of customer-centric research. Traditional focus groups, questionnaires, on-floor polling at trade shows, phone call interviews, online focus groups, etc. All of these research techniques have their place and can provide helpful quantitative and/or qualitative data.

 

One “emerging” type of research very few B2B and technology companies have adopted is ethnography. Conceived in the 1920s by sociologists and cultural anthropologists, ethnography is an observational technique that studies people where they live and work, in their natural environment.

 

Traditional research approaches can sometimes deliver artificial, skewed or false feedback that doesn’t reflect what people really think. Ethnography seeks out – and finds – true thinking, motivations, reactions and yields a deeper understanding.

 

Ethnographical research requires a different mindset and methodology. But it can yield deeper customer-centered insight that can profoundly shape communications strategy, messaging and tactical efforts with all stakeholders.