Following Anthill and Design Victoria’s interesting Venture Capital By Design event in Melbourne last Wednesday night, I was chatting to Oodles.com founder and long-time Anthill fan, Steve Sherlock.
We were discussing the importance of design in branding and, by extension, building market awareness of a product or service. After asking to see my business card and telling me it was crap, he pulled out his card and said, “Notice there’s no tagline? Wanna know why?” I braced myself for his meticulously researched psychometric reasoning. “Coz we couldn’t come up with anything good!”
Fair enough. Anyone who has ever developed their own brand messaging, or merely stared at a blank page waiting for inspiration, knows that coming up with a pithy tagline can be really hard. It’s often harder than developing the core product or service.
Fortunately, these days the crowd is both available and willing to lend a hand. To coincide with today’s relaunch of the Oodles.com website, Sherlock and his team are inviting Twitter users to suggest a tagline for their online car rental platform. The author of the winning tweet tagline (“twagline”?) as chosen by Oodles staff will receive $1,000 cash.
“We had no difficulty generating dozens of tagline options,” says Sherlock. “The problem was that, as a team, we simply couldn’t agree on which one really encapsulated the essence of our brand because it means different things to different people.
“Ultimately we realised that it didn’t matter what the brand means to us; we need to know what it means to our customers. So instead of writing a tagline and then imposing it on the market, we have decided to throw this part of the process open to crowdsourcing.”
Oodles retrieves live inventory directly from car rental companies’ own reservation systems. Users aren’t charged service fees or booking charges, so prices shown are the lowest available.
Oodles recently decided to reposition its site to more intensely target two key customer segments – frequent travellers and VIP car rental members.
The twitter tagline contest runs until the end of September, so if you’re inspired (or broke), head on over to Oodles and lodge your best twaglines.
3 Comments
Steve Sherlock
September 1st, 2009 at 4:20 pm
i didn’t say your card “was” crap, just that “in my view” it was crap
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SH
September 1st, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Great idea – and I love that the company was honest enough to admit they didn’t know which idea would work!
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Gene Stark
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:59 am
Educating the SME market on the importance of a Positioning Statement (tagline) and the process of arriving and then “living” this “slogan” is something that we do on a daily basis with clients as well as with the SME businesses in the form of public speaking as well as contributing to such fine publications as Anthill!
So it is is with great care and passion that I make the following statement – to avoid the crap you need to control the crowd.
“Crowdsourcing” is a great low cost (don’t forget your time is money and for most SME’s / start ups their only currency!) way of receiving consumer feedback and creative ideas, but for the sake of saving everyone’s energy and time, you need to provide some parameters around the objective otherwise you may in fact receive a lot of crap, albeit creative crap!
When designing (anything from products to buildings and marketing communication strategy) you need to embrace restraints: time, budget, target audience, etc.
Most importantly you need to follow a process. The most likely reason you couldn’t agree on a tagline internally in the first place was because you had no standard of evaluation! So in this case before throwing it out to the public you need to establish some guidelines to “control the crowd” – to “heard” their energies and creativity into the right direction! Unless all that you are after is as many twitter, email accounts you can get for your $1,000 and exposure for the website – which in itself is a pretty smart move!
It was only 3 months ago that a similar blog post (How to choose a winning business name) attracted a lively debate on the strategies of naming a business, which is very similar to that of developing a tagline. Adding to my original contribution on the subject and the process that needs to be followed (http://anthillonline.com/how-to-choose-a-winning-business-name/comment-page-1/#comment-6212) for a winning Brand Positioning Statement, the tagline needs to at least achieve the following to some degree: (and this needs to be your evaluation criteria!)
1. Differentiate the business (Communicate the USP)
2. Provide a Creative (“Campaignable” and Sustainable) platform – deep well of marketing ideas and images
3. Benefits should be ideally expressed explicitly to the customer
4. The tagline should provide support to the brand name
For that you need to supply your crowd with what is commonly known as a brief: (and no excuses, anything less than at least a simple written brief is either laziness, not taking the process seriously or irresponsibility, regardless of whether it is your internal marketing people, an agency or a crowd! Expecting them to guess is expecting too much!)
Your brief at the very least needs to provide:
1. Your target audience, their wants, desires, fears…why they buy from you and/or why they would buy from your competitors.
2. Your Unique Selling Proposition / Brand Promise (or whatever de rigueur jargon name, the ad agency world wants to use today!)
3. The Brand Personality / Character you are trying to develop
4. A list of your competitors and their “taglines” or positioning they are striving to occupy in the minds and hearts of your tagert audience!
Common sense is not common. A similar question / debate posted on just one professional marketing LinkedIn group had less than 10% of so called marketing professionals stressing the importance of the process. Let’s show them we can do better at Anthill!
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