Ten Clever Campaign Taglines (and what you can learn from them)

When it comes to branding, words definitely matter. The right words can help your company build emotional connections with customers and team members, shape their thinking about your brand, drive sales and entice your industry’s top talent to want to work with you to help your company achieve its goals. No wonder so many top brands invest in great communications and copywriting talent – because it’s an investment, not an expense. A punchy tagline paired with the right branding ecosystems (such as content marketing, advertising campaigns etc.), can help your branding initiatives to be successful and your sales to skyrocket!

In this article, we’ll take a look at 10 clever campaign taglines that help companies make customers stop in their tracks and take notice of their brands. Note that this article is focusing on taglines used for specific campaigns and omits corporate/overall brand taglines such as Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan.

Let’s get to it!

01.? Men have skin too (Old Spice)

In 2019, Old Spice launched a new campaign with the taglines “Men have skin too.” This tagline is clever for several reasons. The first is that the tagline challenges the widespread belief that men don’t take care of their skin – which is debatable. Challenging widespread beliefs takes guts, but Old Spice went all in on this one. Secondly, the tagline identifies exactly who the campaign is speaking to. There’s no doubt that this campaign is aimed at not just men, but men who care about the health and wellness of their skin and are willing to spend money on the aesthetics of their body. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the tagline makes men feel important. No longer do men have to buy generic skin products or products designed for the ladies. They have their very own line of products custom-made for them, and just them! By communicating that Old Spice takes the skin concerns of men seriously and has put in the effort to solve a problem specifically for men, the brand has set itself up to be noticed by the precise market segment it is going after!

What you can learn from it:

• Don’t be afraid to challenge widely held beliefs
• Identify your specific target market
• Speak directly to your custom

02.? There’s no place like Chrome (Chrome)

The browser wars have been raging since the 1990s (anyone remember Netscape?) and the stakes have been high. The more users a browser has, the more data it can collect on web user behaviors and the more influence it can exert on the future of how we surf the Internet and to this day, browsers like Firefox, Safari and Brave are still competing with Chrome to gain market share. This campaign promoting Google’s Chrome web browser is brilliant. The tagline uses the very familiar term “There’s no place like home” and substituted the word “home” for “Chrome”, which fits perfectly because the two words rhyme. “There’s no place like Chrome” just seems to roll of the tongue effortlessly. More importantly, having a tagline that starts off “There’s no place like…” suggests that there’s no better option available on the market, and the campaign does a good job of positioning Chrome as being dominant among web browsers. The campaign, though, is more than just a catchy tagline. Chrome uses a series of videos in the campaign to sell its benefits to users. The videos in the campaign tout several benefits which Chrome believes set it apart from other browsers – including password protection , malware protection and synched devices features. Overall, the campaign does a good job of using wordplay to catch viewers’ attention and focus that attention on reasons to use Chrome as their preferred browser.

What you can learn from it:

• Differentiate your product/services from your competitors
• Make tweaks to familiar sayings to make them your own
• Where feasible, insert the name of your company or product in the tagline

03.? Oh, Hill Yeah

How many times have you, or someone you know, enthusiastically responded “Oh, hell yeah!” in response to a question or an opportunity? I’d wager quite often. Apparently, so does Hillshire Farm. The company uses the public’s familiarity of this popular phrase to power its cheeky campaign with the campaign slogan “Oh, Hill Yeah” – just by swapping out one vowel for another. This campaign isn’t just cheeky, it’s hella clever as well. Because the slogan “Oh, Hill Yeah” contains the first syllable of the company’s name, every time it is used in ads, it automatically reminds consumers of the name of the brand without breaking a sweat. But the cleverness doesn’t end there. Because the brand’s slogan is so close to the pop phrase “Oh, hell yeah”, with enough campaign repetition by the company, it’s quite possible that every time consumers hear the pop phrase they’ll think of Hillshire Farm – increasing the possibility that they’ll buy the company’s products.

What you can learn from it:

• Make tweaks to familiar sayings to make them your own
• Where feasible, insert the name of your company or product (or parts of it) in the tagline

04.? Cook Like a Mother ( Ragú)

Okay, set aside for a second that lots of men do cook and that some of the best chefs in the culinary world are male, this campaign tagline still does a good job of capturing the attention of the intended audience. There’s a good chance that most people have fond memories of their mothers cooking for them when they were kids. By reminding consumers of those fond memories, the campaign tagline does a good job of connecting emotionally with viewers of the ads. The campaign tagline also does a good job of selling the benefits of using the product. If you enjoyed your mother’s cooking, then cooking “like a mother” is certainly a benefit that might entice you to purchase the product on your next trip to the supermarket. But the tagline is also very cheeky. Yeah, ?Ragú, we see you! Let’s not pretend you’re not tapping into the highly vulgar term “like a mother-f*****”. You’d have to have been raised in a monastery or a convent not to make that connection. But ?Ragú does well to go straight up to the proverbial line but not crossing the line. Good job, Ragu!

What you can learn from it:

• Use emotion to connect with your customers
• Sell the benefits of using your product
• You can get away with being cheeky once you don’t go too far

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05.? FCK (KFC)

Things got real for KFC in 2018! As in, really, really bad. Due to logistical issues, many of the company’s UK restaurants ran out of chicken. “How does KFC run out of chicken?” was the main theme on social media for days. After all, the word chicken is smack dab in the name of the company – “Kentucky Fried Chicken”. Fortunately, KFC managed to turn the negative publicity into a positive when it released a heartfelt apology in print media which rearranged the letters in the company’s acronym from KFC to FCK! Cutting it quite close there, aren’t you, KFC? Just one vowel away from the most famous “F-word” in the English language!? The ad was an immediate hit and got the company “bucket loads” of mouth-watering publicity as consumers focused on the cleverness of the ad rather than the FCK-up of the company running out of chicken.

What you can learn from it:

• ‘Fess up when you mess up! Own up to your mistake and apologize
• Be edgy, but don’t cross the line into the territory of being offensive
• Where possible, use your name (or a derivation of it) in your tagline

06.? Big Gas Savings (Kmart)

Even though as a brand, Kmart is no longer the retail juggernaut it once was, some of its ad campaigns and taglines are timeless. One that stands out is its “Big Gas Savings ” campaign, a promotion that let consumers know that they could get “Big Gas Savings” when they shopped at Kmart. The campaign starts out innocently enough, with the tagline “Big Gas Savings” being used throughout the ad. But as more of the ad’s characters repeat the tagline, it becomes very difficult to tell whether they are saying “Big Gas Savings” or “Big Ass Savings” which are phonetically almost indistinguishable from each other! And that’s what makes the campaign both memorable and funny!

What you can learn from it:

• Humor is a great way to connect with your customers
• You can get away with being cheeky once you don’t go too far

07.? “Booking” (Booking.com )

Okay, so this ad campaign is kinda the odd man out on this list in the sense that it’s not the tagline (Booking.yeah) that makes it remarkable, but a derivation of the tagline that is weaved through the storylines of the campaign. While the newer iterations of Booking.com campaigns are a bit safer than the original set of ads, they still kick butt. In the ads, Booking.com uses the word “Booking” in much the same way that people might use “The F-word” in a sentence. For instance, in this ad , the narrator says of the characters, “You got it booking right!”, “It doesn’t get any booking better than this!”, “Look at the booking view!”, “This is exactly what you booking needed!” and “Bask in the booking glory!”

What you can learn from it:

• Humor is a great way to connect with your customers
• Use wordplay in clever ways to capture and keep consumers’ attention
• You can get away with being cheeky once you don’t go too far
• If possible, include your brand name in your campaigns

08.? Impossible is Nothing! (Adidas)

Adidas has always been playing a game of catch-up with Nike, the company that has held a stranglehold on the sneaker market for decades. But in 2004, Adidas launched an ad that made the brand stand out. The campaign tagline “Impossible is nothing” inspired its audience to do great things by flipping the well-known phrase “Nothing is impossible” on its head. The campaign featured greats like Beyoncé , David Beckham , Haile Gebrselassie and Muhammed Ali , who defied the odds with their paths to success and made the impossible feel achievable to anyone who saw the campaign.

What you can learn from it:

• Find ways to defy commonly held beliefs
• Inspire and challenge your audience to do and be better

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09.? Bud-Weis-Er (Budweiser)

One of Budweiser’s most memorable advertising campaigns consisted of a total of one word: “Budweiser” – the name of the brand. But it wasn’t the name of the brand that made it one of the most awesome campaigns of all time! It is the way that the word was presented. By now, you’ve probably guessed that I’m talking about the famous “Budweiser Frogs” ad series which features three frogs croaking the beer brand’s name. The ad was both creative and original. How many ad execs would approve of an ad which comprised solely of frogs croaking the name of their brand. Fortunately for consumers, Budweiser execs did! The original ad came out as part of the 1995 Superbowl game, and was followed up with several different iterations which lasted until 2000. You know that an ad is successful when people are still talking about it and, in some cases, even walking around croaking the tagline. The campaign was so popular and effective that it landed as #34 on The Drum’s list of World’s Best Ads Ever.

What you can learn from it:

• Be original. Be different.
• Humor works wonders
• Find creative ways to work the name of your brand into your campaign

10.? Wha-zaaaaaaap! (Budweiser)

It seems unfair to have one brand make the list twice, but it would almost be sacrilegious to leave this memorable campaign on the cutting floor. When the Budweiser frogs campaign was discontinued, the company needed another hit campaign to keep consumer attention focused directly on the brand. And they found it with this campaign. Even though the “official” tagline of this Budweiser campaign, which ran from 1999 to 2002 was “True”, it was better known by beer drinkers and non-beer drinkers alike as the “Wha-zaaaaaaap! ” campaign. The first iteration of the campaign consisted of a bunch of guys having a conversation and addressing each other by over-emphasizing the common greeting “Whazup?” and turning it into the now-famous catchphrase “Wha-zaaaaaaap!” with their tongues extended. After the commercial aired, “Wha-zaaaaaaap!” seemed to become the default (and preferred) greeting not only for beer drinkers, but for anyone who had seen the ad, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity or nationality. The campaign was so memorable that, years after the campaign officially ended, many people still greeted each other with a “Wha-zaaaaaaap!” greeting accompanied by an extended tongue.

What you can learn from it:

• Lightning can strike twice – don’t be afraid to move away from one tagline that worked in the past and move towards something new
• Tap into the cultural zeitgeist
• Humor has incredible longevity and can keep your campaign front and center for years to come

Developing your own campaigns to promote your brand? Take inspiration from these ten campaign taglines and develop a tagline that enhances the effectiveness and memorability of your campaign.

Hi, there! My name is Ron Johnson. I am the author of the book Tighten Your Shoelaces and the creator of the “The Bhranding Equation” (Branding + HR = “Bhranding”), a framework designed to break down the silos between branding and HR teams and replace those silos with powerful organizational synergies. If you need support in getting your branding and HR teams on the same page and need some support in the form of workshops, consulting or executive coaching, feel free to DM me right here on LinkedIn to explore how I can help. Need more info on me and what I do? Visit my website then reach out.