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!