Is this the death of the slogans and straplines or just a change of how we use them?

Slogans and straplines are commonplace with many small businesses, and podcasts too – hey lots of radio stations have them.  Marketing friends of mine tell me that they stem from the heady days of TV advertising when a slogan actually meant something.  When people would repeat them back.

More recently there has been a move away from slogans.

I worked at a radio station back in the early naughties that had what I thought was one of the best straplines ever. TLR was a fairly small station with a huge heart broadcasting to the Isle of Thanet in Kent, UK.

It was within the broadcasting area of Invicta FM, a regional juggernaut of a station with ten times the marketing spend as the small commercial station. Hey we didn’t worry. TLR punched well above its weight.

One of the clever things we did, we thought, was come up with a great slogan or strapline that explained our music policy. Invicta was today’s best music, whilst TLR came up with a play on this.

We said ‘not just today’s music, but the best music’. What was fun was our listener got it. I was the marketing guy, as well as some on air shifts, and when I went out the listener would often repeat the slogan back to me.

Years latter I recall sitting in a meeting for hours where they, we, discussed the merits of a new strapline. I recall said the agency people had tested the power of each word with a selection of our listeners was very positive. I came away from that meeting thinking – what a load of goats piffle. They came up with “The best music variety”. Only of it had been true.

Another incarnation of a station strapline came up with “purely local”, and yet another said “The music you want and the news you need”.  Actually the last one was OK-ish, it said what the station was trying to do, yet – and here’s an issue, listeners regularly said to me “but you don’t play the music I want or give me the news I need”.

There are some that say it doesn’t matter what you say, if the product is rubbish and the experience is bad then it’s bad. It’s all about how your listener feels about what they hear and therefore there is no need for a slogan or strapline.

After all Netflix, Amazon and Disney don’t have a slogan and Apple hasn’t used its Think Different for years. That’s because they don’t need to. Instead they concentrate on the brand experience rather than a slogan that tells you what that experience should be.

In fact in the marketing world of today where your customer tells your customer how good you are, perhaps the slogan should be more of a welcome statement.

Perhaps Radio Skills for Podcasters Slogan should be – skilful help for your podcast – that’s if we should have one anyway.

Here’s a couple of other radio people with their views on the slogan talk – David Lloyd reminisces about BBC Radio 2’s Slogans   and Kevin Robinson talks RIP Slogans.