Monday, December 6, 2010

FIFTEEN PRINCIPLES FOR CREATIVE SLOGANS

In June I published a post about a dozen principles for creative slogans. Now, after further study, I wish to add some principles and increase their number to fifteen.

1. Alliteration:
“I’m fit not fat”.
This is a slogan many women need to remember.

2. Concord:
The Generic Pharmaceutical Association’s slogan is “Same Medicine, Same Results.”

3. Contraries:
George Eastman coined the slogan, "you press the button, we do the rest," when he introduced the Kodak camera in 1888 and within a year, it became a well-known phrase.

4. Direct command:
"Think Different" is an advertising slogan created for Apple Computer in 1997 by the Los Angeles office of advertising agency TBWA.

5. Rhyme:
"Better dead than Red" was an anti-Communist phrase, possibly first used during World War II (in German as "Lieber tot als rot") and later during the Cold War by the United States.

6. Pun:
“The Conservative party’s 1978 poster of a snaking line of people queuing for the unemployment office under the slogan ‘Labour isn’t working’ has been voted the poster advertisement of the century.
Do you see what is the pun here? The word 'Labour' has two meanings: (1) a party's name, (2) the very word 'labour' means 'work'.

7. Imitation, parody:
In one of its ads, Verizon mocks the iPhone's catchphrase, "there's an app for that." Verizon has tweaked it, and says instead, "there's a map for that."

8. Direct appeal to "You":
Yahoo has slogans: “The Internet is under new management: Yours” and “The Internet has a new personality: Yours.”

9. Famous Name:
There is a company claiming to forecast the future - The Channeled Readings. It announced a new company slogan . . . The Nostradamus of the NEWS!

10. Other dimension:
In this case a smell is used as a new dimension for a slogan:
In Summer 2009, after city workers, who went back to work after a strike that lasted 36 days, had cleaned up the mess on streets of Toronto, Tourism Toronto launched a newspaper campaign celebrating the end of the strike.
The headline was: "Toronto Never Smelled So Good." The ads were meant to remind Ontarians that Toronto is a great place to come during the summer - especially now that city workers had cleaned up the mess on streets and makeshift landfills.

11. Compliment to the customer:
The SYMS discount clothing chain has an unforgettable slogan: “An educated consumer is our best customer.”

12. Logical Statement:
Deng Xiaoping (in China) became famous for saying: “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mice” – a slogan he used to start capitalist-style economic reforms in a country that officially subscribed to communism.

13. Rhetorical question:
Bold for Breast Cancer is an event created in the summer of 2008 to help raise awareness of breast cancer in a less conventional way through the art of body painting. The slogan is, "breast cancer isn't shy, why should we be?"

14. Humor:
"It's the economy, stupid" was a phrase widely used during Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign against George H.W. Bush. For a time, Bush was considered unbeatable because of foreign policy developments such as the end of the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War. The phrase refers to the notion that Clinton was a better choice because Bush had not adequately addressed the economy, which had recently undergone a recession.

15. Figure of speech:
There are various figures of speech. One of them is chiasmus. Like this: Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind." John F. Kennedy