Catchy slogans in politics?

Jason is looking for some help with a catchy slogan. How about: “Chuck Norris Approved“?

Catchy slogans

I saw in the news today that actor who played Mr. Whipple (“Please don’t squeeze the Charmin”) passed away. It got me thinking about great marketing slogans of the past. Think about it – can you name the companies behind these slogans?

“Don’t leave home without it.”

“It keeps going and going and going.”

“Good to the last drop.”

“We bring good things to life.”

All say something — something about the product, and something about what they are trying to be. That’s what a slogan is all about.

I’m trying to come up with a catchy slogan right now — and it’s like squeezing blood from a stone. Something catchy, short, meaningful, andable to encapsulate a huge concept in less than 10 words. I’d rather write a speech!

If you want to think some more about slogans, check out the chapter “Be the Message” in Words that Work. It will help you drill down to the absolute core message a slogan should be.

Cutting thru the noise

Andrea Southcott, one of the finest advertising and marketing professionals I have ever met, has some sage advice on getting your marketing message out.

Getting heard in a society bombarded with noise from all sorts of media has become one of the leading challenges of all communicators today. There’s a multiplicity of communications channels that we have to contend with:

- Traditional media in the form of newspapers, television news and radio talk shows

- New media channels on the Internet including online-only news sites, blogs, email, news aggregators, and discussion forums

- Social media that ranges from good old-fashioned word-of-mouth to Facebook-style networks

- Traditional advertising in the form of 30-second TV commercials, billboards, print ads

- New advertising techniques in forms that don’t even appear to be advertising or that are tailored to individual interests (for more on the changing nature of advertising, see IBM’s new report, “The end of advertising as we know it“)

We ignore any of these channels at our peril and Andrea’s column in the Globe and Mail is a nice introduction to the principles we must keep in mind while getting our messages across.