What’s in a Tagline?

Darin Reffitt on August 29, 2017

Taglines serve a special role in the world of marketing. Working in concert with a company’s logomark and branding, the purpose of a tagline is to distill an organization’s mission, product and value to stakeholders into a few short words, often defined as a “memorable dramatic phrase.” It can be a challenging endeavor, and getting a tagline just right can take significant time and financial investment.

But the payoff can be significant, as well. A good tagline helps to quickly differentiate and summarize a company’s offering and—if memorable and effective—help to solidify a company’s value in the minds of consumers. Some of the greatest taglines have been in place for years, and are clearly “owned” by the companies they represent. If I say Just Do It there’s a good chance that Nike comes to mind. If I say Think Different, The Real Thing, or The Breakfast of Champions, I’d wager that Apple, Coca-Cola, and Wheaties were all quickly recalled as the brands owning those phrases.

Of course, for every Have it Your Way and Plop Plop, Fizz Fizz (Burger King and Alka Seltzer, respectively) there are a lot more taglines along the lines of Lovin’ Beats Hatin’, Enjoy Better, Today Tastes So Good, and It’s Not For Women. Not sure who used those taglines? Well, that’s kind of the point (and in the case of the last one, probably a good thing for the brand that used it.) But for the record, the companies who chose those taglines were McDonald’s, Time Warner Cable, KFC, and Dr. Pepper.

So, getting your tagline right is important. It needs to capture who you are and how you differentiate from the competition, ideally in a way that creates an “aha!” moment in the mind of your customer.

So, with all that in mind, SPLICE Software was excited to unveil our new tagline to the market in early July:

Inspiring Customer Connections.

At its heart, SPLICE and our Data-Driven Dialogs® don’t just communicate information. They leverage big data and AI to deliver emotionally-relevant human voice messages to our clients’ customers via their channels of choice. They’re used by insurers, financial services companies, and retailers to deliver the information customers want, and flip the onus of keeping customers informed, leading to greater brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Our clients’ customers are even inviting them into their homes by enabling Alexa Skills to get information when and where they want it.

They truly enable our clients to build stronger connections with their customers.

Meanwhile, our phone dialogs aren’t robocalls. They’re personalized calls that “splice” personal information into the recording, in a way that sounds natural. That difference is significant, and doing it well is truly an art—which is why we say we combine art and science to connect you with your customers.

At heart our team are artists, who work in the medium of audio. And what do artists do? They create, they drive emotion, and they INSPIRE.

I’ve been asked: “Is ‘Inspiring’ an adjective or a verb?” and my answer is “Yes.”

At SPLICE, Inspiring Customer Connections is what we do, and how we do it. We create stronger connections with customers that inspire customer behaviors (like being on time for an appointment) and customer loyalty (based on customer opt-ins and customer satisfaction surveys.). But the messages themselves are also inspiring, as they as are personalized and enable customers to feel more connected to the company that provides the information they want, when and how they want it.

We at SPLICE are very proud of our new tagline, as it encompasses our company culture and what drives us every day to say “We believe it can be better.”

So that’s the story behind our new tagline. It took time to develop, but almost no time to know we’d found the right message. Because, in the end, it was truly inspired.