Naming in an AI Age

Your Slogan is your Fountain of Youth

• The NameStormers • Season 3 • Episode 6

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In this episode of Naming in an AI Age, Mike Carr highlights the growing importance of slogans and taglines. He calls a great tagline a brand’s “fountain of youth”—keeping it fresh, clear, and emotionally resonant. Taglines can energize dull names, clarify positioning, and act as a “verbal logo” when visuals aren’t available. When names fall short, a strong slogan adds context and impact. Mike wraps up by sharing Andy Crestodina’s framework for smarter AI prompting to craft better taglines.

Mike Carr (00:05):

Welcome back to naming in an AI Age. This week we're going to talk about slogans and taglines, which relate to names. And the thing I want to start with is thinking about your slogan as your fountain of youth. And some folks think that slogans or taglines are irrelevant and don't make sense in today's world. And I have absolutely the opposite opinion, and here's why. When I was in college eons ago, I worked for Dr. Pepper in their co-op program, and the Dr. Pepper brand was sacrosanct. You just didn't screw with it. You didn't change it. But every year or two, why in our young and Rubicon out New York would come up with a new tagline. And so over the years, and even over the decades, it kept Dr. Pepper very hip and very relevant. So the brand grew with the times, what it stood for, changed with the times, but the name itself did not change.

(01:07):

So I think as the noise level continues and the amount of distraction in today's world continues, having a tagline or a slogan that keeps your brand relevant and exciting and fresh is super important. Item number two, and I'm going to talk today about five, five of these reasons. Your slogan and tagline is more important today than ever before. Item number two is it's the hook if you have a boring name. So what do I mean by that? Well, unfortunately, most names out there are pretty boring. They're honors. They don't elicit much engagement or emotional reaction at all, and it just sort of falls flat. And some of the most famous names when they first came out didn't mean a whole lot. You think about Apple Computer, well, who cares, right? An Apple, everyone knows what an apple is. Oh, it's a computer. Well, maybe that's interesting, maybe it's not.

(02:06):

But then Jobs and his agency came out with the tagline, think different. And if you remember back to some of those ads, it really did embody their brand. It really made sense, and it was the hook. Apple, think different, think different, had the stopping power. And combined with Apple, it really built that brand. Or Nike, who knows what Nike is? Well, you just do it, right? So if you have a boring name, the tag, the slogan can really bring the name alive. Number three, it helps you convey your brand position, connects you with your target. So De Beers tagline or slogan is a diamond is forever. So beers is that big, huge global diamond mining firm. And you think about how emotional diamonds can be, right? Getting that engagement ring and you want to be wed with your new husband forever. And this idea that a diamond is forever, I mean, it just brings alive the value and the aspirations that you have for that engagement ring in that diamond or the diamond necklace, earrings, state Farm, like a good neighbor State Farm is theirs.

(03:22):

So you think about insurance, you've got to have someone you trust, right? I mean, this tagline brings alive what everybody's looking for in insurance, man, I got a problem. I got a disaster. I need help now, like a good neighbor, state Farm is there, or Wendy's, you think about how crowded the QSR space is or the fast food spaces. You got Burger King, you got McDonald's, subway, where's the beef? They're sort of making fun of the other guys. You get these monster bun as itty bitty, bitty, bitty beef patty. And their ads for a while really emphasize, Hey, with Wendy's, you get some real meat inside your sandwich, not just a few samplings, but there's a serious burger there. So it distilled their brand essence and it made a promise to the customers. Number four, a slogan is your secret weapon when you develop a new name, especially if you don't have a chance to tell the story.

(04:25):

So now we're going to talk a little bit about naming and how important that slogan is. So when you develop a new name, if you do this yourself, you do this with your team and you've got some things that you've just poured your heart, blood, sweat, tears, everything into, and you send out the list for comments to your boss, your boss's boss, what do you think is going to happen? That's a terrible idea. First of all, you just don't send out a list. Why do you not send out a list? Because there's no context, there's nothing wrapped around it. All they're going to look at is a list of boring, new names that don't mean hardly anything to them, and you're not going to get the kind of reaction that you're after. But if you have at least a tagline attached or a slogan attached to that name, like Apple, think different, Nike, just do it.

(05:12):

Wendy's the beef. It's this idea that, hey, that peaks their imagination. It gets them thinking about it the right way. So ideally, you want to present the name with the story and all the context and the wind dressing wrapped around it that really brings that name alive. But if you don't have the opportunity to do so, and in many cases you don't, or the attention span of whomever you're talking to is pretty limited, that tagline helps immensely if it's well crafted. And number five, what if your name is heard first not seen? Well, that slogan or tagline can be your verbal logo. So you don't see it. You just hear Apple think different, and that tag sort of connects emotionally and it sort of has that cool factor and it stops you when you start to think about it. And you pay attention to the conversation.

(06:08):

It provides the emotional glue that stickiness around the name. It's often the difference between the name being remembered, your brand being remembered and quickly forgotten to where they can't even recall five minutes later that they saw the ad or they heard it in conversation or whatever it might be. So let's talk about how you create the perfect tagline with the help of ai. And there's a guy I follow that I can't recommend enough. His name is Andy Cina, and he wrote a book called Content Chemistry, the Illustrated Guide to Content Marketing. And I think he got his seventh edition just came out, but he recently had a blog post through his company, orbit Media. And the blog post is the seven Stages of AI Proficiency. It's a big deal. And if you think you know how to use AI or if you don't think you know how to use ai, you have to get a copy of this thing.

(07:08):

We'll put the link in the show notes for this podcast, but lemme talk about these seven stages of AI proficiency just real quick. So you can think about how you prompt AI when it comes to tagline. So define your brand foundation. What do you want your tagline to do? How's it supposed to relate to your mission and vision? Is it supposed to speak to your core values or does it solve a problem for your customers? Do you want to build this into your prompting, right? The more you tell ai, the better it's going to do. So if you share with it some of those attributes, your core values, the emotions you want to evoke, how it makes you different from your competitors, talk to it and prompt it with your audience. Who's the target? What's the brand archetype? What's the demographic information? What are the psychographic insights, the pain points that they have?

(08:01):

What outcome does your brand provide that you maybe want reflected in the slogan? And of course, you've got to limit how long the slogan's going to be, or pretty soon before you know it, you've got a paragraph which really isn't a slogan or a tagline, right? So three words, four words, five words. You can't encapsulate all of this, but when you think about how to prompt ai and of course have it, keep it as short as possible, then you'll have to do some wordsmithing on your own perhaps to get that final diamond. But these are some great prompts to think about. Ask us to go out and look at some competitors taglines, maybe even provide those taglines to it. The most recent versions can go out and scrape the web up until almost a minute you're using them and find what's out there. But if you want to make sure you give it headed in the right direction, you give it some taglines that are out there, the themes that are being used, what the USPS are unique selling propositions.

(08:50):

You brainstorm without constraints. So you give AI the freedom to do all kinds of things. You may even make some suggestions, right? So do some word association exercises. Think about different words you can put together in different combinations. Give us some what if scenarios. Some ways the tagline might be seen or viewed or used at a trade show on signage side of a truck, back of the booth, white paper presentation, keynote speech, whatever. Ask it to explore metaphors. Ask it to use the language your customers use in creating the tagline and then apply some other filters. These can be strategic filters, brand alignment, repeat and make sure it aligns with your brand distinctiveness. Is it memorable? It's hard for ai, I think, to assess some of these things, but nevertheless, giving it some of these prompts and then going back and changing the prompt based upon how it does, you can often fine tune it to where we're getting some pretty good stuff.

(09:53):

Does it work across your entire set of products and services? Is it legally viable? AI is getting better and better every day at sussing this kind of stuff out? I don't think you can test it yet. There's a lot of debate about the value of synthetic respondents using AI to mimic a customer and say, Hey, run this by a hundred customers, but they're not real. They're synthetic and tell me how they would react. But it's improving. And for something that doesn't have a huge budget, you might want to do a little bit of that testing with ai. So pay attention to some of these AI prompts and what it's coming up with. Certainly think about the kind of slogan you're after. And we're going to have a link here to a blog post that we're going to put out on our website that gives you a bit more background. But hope this helps. Slogans can be that fountain of youth for you. It can keep your brand fresh and new and exciting year after year, decade after decade, even though your brand name doesn't change. Have a great week. See you.