I love when brands have bold taglines, ones that can be used against them.
I gave a talk at Showtime a while back and had to praise them for their tagline “Brace Yourself,” which was way better than earlier taglines like “No Limits” and “Hollywood Hits No One Else Has.” I told them that having a tagline that can be used against you keeps your team honest.
You’re walking down a dark alley. Brace yourself.
We got the results of your MRI. Brace yourself.
Dad, do you remember that guy you told me not to date? Well…brace yourself.
This is your captain speaking: our landing gear isn’t working and we’re out of fuel. Brace yourself.
My tagline for ComicMix was “We’ve got issues!” and my tagline for Crowd Fusion was “It serves you right.” If you have a 9-hour outage and TMZ and The Daily are offline, you’d better believe that all the headlines will be a joke about “It really does serve you right for choosing Crowd Fusion!” A bold tagline makes you work a little harder to avoid that ridicule.
My site’s original tagline was “A brief history of time from the Big Bang to the Bangles.” I loved the Stephen Hawking book when I was getting my physics degree and I felt like discussing the history of mankind up through the ’80s would give me plenty to blog about.
Then my site’s tagline became “Now with 20% more sincerity!” Of course, if you have to preface what you say with something like “honestly,” then you’re either about to lie or you’ve been lying all along.
My newest tagline is “Adventures of a Startup CEO.”
Some of you have pointed out that I stopped being a startup CEO last June when we acquired Ceros, which already had a great CEO. So either I’m going to write a whole lot of posts about what I learned in my five years as CEO of Crowd Fusion or I’m going to be a startup CEO again soon.
We’ll see.
Brian Alvey 