Taglines & Slogans: What They Do & How They Work Together

If you don’t know the difference between taglines and slogans, then you’re not alone. Most people don’t. A notable percentage of people who work in advertising don’t know either. And it’s such a shame, because they actually serve two distinct purposes.

The Difference Between Taglines & Slogans

Taglines are for brands. The purpose of a tagline is to tell your brand story in a way that your company’s name can’t. It has to encapsulate your brand and give a lot of direction to the kinds of storytelling you do.

Slogans are for ad campaigns. Campaigns should obviously make sense within a brand, but they can be for individual products, lines of products, or deals, so slogans can speak more to a specific campaign that might not live forever. 

These differences are even more pronounced when you get into the history of these words. That’s right, it’s time for an etymology lesson. Slogan originates from the 1670s, from the Gaelic “sluagh-ghairm,” which was the term for a battle cry used by Scottish and Irish warriors charging into battle. Yes, that is spectacular. Tagline, meanwhile, comes from English in 1916, meaning the last line of an actor’s speech. Yes, that is less spectacular.

Does knowing the history of these two phrases help you understand how they’re used today or how to write a good one? No. But now that you know to use a battle cry for your campaign and an easy-to-remember last line of a play for your brand, you’ll think twice about getting the two mixed up.

What Makes a Good Tagline?

The goal of the tagline is to summarize the brand. People should be able to get the general vibe of your brand after reading your tagline even if they have no idea what the product is. Because in numerous instances they’re going to appear next to your company name or as part of a logo, they should be pretty short; ideally four words or less.

Great Tagline Examples

Nike: “Just Do It.” 

This is maybe the most famous tagline in the world. Obviously its fame is largely attributed to the wider success of the company as a whole. When you’re as big as Nike (market cap of $76 billion give or take) people are probably going to know your tagline whether it’s good or not. That being said, it is in fact excellent. If you had never heard of Nike before, nothing about the company name would indicate to you that it’s a sports apparel company. Nike is just a name. Nike’s brand is about pushing yourself to be the best. 

We don’t just buy Nike sweatpants so you can wear something comfortable on a long flight. We buy them so our legs can move freely when we’re at the gym at dawn. Well, we mostly do the first thing, but the point is that’s not what we’re supposed to do. 

Staples: “That Was Easy.”

Unlike Nike, the name “Staples” already gives you an idea of what the business is. If you were hearing the name for the first time, you might not immediately make the connection that it’s a store for all kinds of office supplies, but you might think, “What do they sell? Staples?” and you’d be right. With a name that establishes the product, the tagline is free to focus on what the customer values. What do people want most out of their office supply stores? Convenience, apparently.

Not-As-Great Tagline Examples

Sony: “It’s a Sony!”

Most of the time when a tagline doesn’t work, it doesn’t stick around for very long, so we had to go back to the 80s to find this one. “It’s a Sony!” doesn’t work for the obvious reason that it doesn’t really tell you anything about the brand apart from what should be obvious. It doesn’t speak to any company value or any kind of brand identity. You get no new information from the tagline. Imagine if you’d never heard of this company and were seeing its branding for the first time.

Sony. “Oh gee, what’s a Sony?” It’s a Sony! “Awesome. Thank you.”

The reason this underwhelming tagline came about is that it was a band-aid for a larger branding problem. In 1982, the company introduced this secondary logo.

What to some, might look like a bunch of random dots is actually supposed to be an “S” for “Sony.” The company rightly assumed that people would have a hard time figuring out what that was supposed to be and created a tagline meant to clarify.

Mastercard: “There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard.” 

My goodness, is it still going? We have an idea for an alternative. “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” 

This tagline originally came about as part of the “Priceless” campaign in 1997, a campaign so successful that it mostly hasn’t stopped running since. Part of the issue with this is that there’s still some ambiguity about whether this is actually the tagline or the slogan.

If you watch the original 1997 commercial, the voiceover says “…an autographed baseball: 45 dollars. Real conversation with your 11-year-old son: priceless.” That reads more like content of the ad than branding for the company overall.

“Priceless” is the campaign, not the brand, and so it’s used where the slogan should be used. “There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard,” is with the logo, where the tagline should be. But each reads like it should be the other way around.

What Makes a Good Slogan?

Slogans are specific to a campaign, so they allow for a little more flexibility. While they should still be brief, the word count isn’t as much of a concern as it is with taglines. Slogans should be catchy and memorable, sticking in someone’s mind and reminding them of the ad.

A Great Slogan Example

Michelob Ultra: “Play You for an Ultra”

This slogan started during their 2025 Super Bowl campaign. Their ad for the big game showed two people portrayed by Willem Dafoe and Catherine O’Hara pretending to be novices at pickle ball, wagering Michelob Ultras, and then winning emphatically.

This is an effective slogan in part because it clearly accomplishes the goal of the campaign. Michelob Ultra has increasingly positioned themselves as the athlete’s beer. It’s what someone drinks as a reward for completing a Spartan Race, not what someone drinks in a dive bar until they pass out. This tagline creates a clear connection between the product and the desired weekend warrior audience.

It’s also worth noting that there’s something brilliant about shortening your product name in a slogan. It makes it sound like the product is more in the cultural zeitgeist than it probably is in reality, but reality’s what you make it.

A Not-As-Great Slogan Example

Pepsi: “Live for Now”

This is the slogan for a campaign that started in 2012 and abruptly and unceremoniously ended in 2017 when they made that commercial with Kendall Jenner. You remember that one? The one where she solved America’s political divide with a Pepsi? How could you forget?

It’s clear from the ads themselves that this campaign was meant to be targeted towards young adults. The message they’re trying to send seems to be something like, “Hey, you’re young. Enjoy your life. Have a Pepsi,” but when you actually read the slogan, it doesn’t come across that way at all. There’s no real connection between the slogan and the product. People already know the Pepsi brand, and this is a weird message to hear from them. “Live for Now.” Uhhh, okay. Thank you Pepsi.

It seems like they tried to do a lot of the same things that Nike does with their tagline, “Just Do It.” It’s a call to action encouraging people to seize the day, but it just misses the mark.

How Should They Work Together?

Any time you’re ideating a new campaign, the existing branding has to be considered. We can’t just come up with ideas that are antithetical to a company’s brand image that they’ve built over years.

Slogans are temporary, but taglines are (mostly) permanent, so it’s important not to write a slogan that contradicts the goals of an existing tagline. That being said, because slogans are campaign specific, they’re flexible. The essential thing is that they’re specific to the actual content of the campaign. Your newest ad campaign is not the same as your brand. As long as slogans and taglines stay in their lanes, then you’ll avoid an accident.

Has looking at these great (or not so great) examples made you curious about your tagline or campaign slogan? Well then schedule an appointment with the word nerds. If you come to the labs for a meeting, we even promise we won’t talk about etymology.