I was behind a transport truck the other day that had this proudly displayed across the back:
YOUR SUCCESS IS OUR BUSINESS
I’ve seen these trucks for years. Every time I read it, I have the same thought. What does that even mean?
It’s one of those sentences that sounds important until you spend more than three seconds thinking about it.
Of course your success is their business. They’re a business.
That’s literally how this works.
It could be a logistics company. A bank. An accounting firm. A dog groomer. Any company really.
It’s so “on the nose” that it disappears.
Another that gets me.
INNOVATION THAT EXCITES
And this one isn’t just on trucks. You see it on big budget TV ads for one of the world’s most recognizable automotive brands. Advertising budget in the billions annually. You’d think they could spare a few dollars on copy writers.
In PR school, I had a class on writing for the media.
Barry…I can’t remember his last name…was my teacher.
A former journalist and, I’m fairly certain, someone who considered editing a contact sport. Every assignment came back looking like it had lost a knife fight.
There was one word he killed every single time.
That.
“That,” you see, is a signal of a weak sentence. Proof of lazy writing. And there it was in a tagline.
At first, I figured it was something a local dealership had whipped together over a long weekend. Not so. It’s the tagline you’d see on their Super Bowl ad if they had one.
Enough picking on Nissan. I drove three of their vehicles in a row, so clearly the tagline wasn’t getting in the way.
Others you might see…
“Committed to excellence.”
“Solutions for tomorrow.”
“Partners in success.”
They all have one thing in common.
They’re perfectly accurate. And completely forgettable.
We were doing this exact exercise with a client recently. They started with AI, of course. It generates hundreds of options in seconds. Good to have options.
And hundreds it did.
Every one, perfectly accurate.
And completely forgettable.
So we went back to the masters. The people who created the lines that have lived in our heads for decades.
JUST DO IT.
THINK DIFFERENT.
A DIAMOND IS FOREVER.
NOBODY EVER GOT FIRED FOR BUYING IBM.
The best taglines in the world have a few things in common.
They express a belief people want to share.
They’re bigger than the company or what it does.
They leave room for people to see themselves in the message.
So much so, you’d happily wear them on a T-shirt.
So we stopped asking for more options and started applying better filters: shared belief, identity, tension, meaning, and the T-shirt test.
We landed somewhere completely different. Success!
You’ll see the sign on their building in a few weeks.
Taglines are tough.
We don’t have one for OnPrpose.
I’ve tried. And failed to capture the sweet spot.
We started with:
FIRST INSPIRE.
Too soft. A bit abstract.
WANT BETTER RESULTS? TELL BETTER STORIES.
True. Powerful. Feels like advice. Not identity.
We literally made a T-shirt once that said…
ONCE UPON A TIME,
WE CHANGED THE WORLD
ONPRPOSE
I still love this one, but it’s a bit long.
I think we had a batch of business cards printed with:
TELL A STORY. CHANGE THE WORLD.
The strongest yet. I’m sticking with it. For now.
It passes the T-shirt test.
How about yours?
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Each week, I share something I’m learning, living, or working out in real time. It’s part storytelling, part reflection. I hope there’s something in it for you too.
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