Coming up in marketing and advertising the tagline was an indispensable part of any ‘big idea’ and subsequent campaign. The best taglines were meant to embody the essence of a brand’s positioning (a term coined by Jack Trout and Al Ries). Positioning, in turn, was the expression of a brand’s longterm strategic place among its competitors.

From ‘You’ve come a long way baby’ to ‘Gets ring around the collar and your whole wash clean’ to ‘Just do it’, ‘It keeps going, and going and going’, and ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine’, taglines reflected the essence of advertising; that being a one-way dictation of what a brand stood for.

These taglines were pounded into our heads on TV, in print, online, at events, in store, and on and on. Integrated Marketing was a late 90′s trend in response to media fragmentation. It held that a a company needed to pick a positioning it wanted to hold in the market and reinforce that through every available channel of communication. The tagline became a thread across media, connecting the dots and creating a whole brand image.

Positioning took time. Branding took time. Companies, in thinking through their tagline were encouraged to think about where they wanted to be five years in the future.

But what good is a five year plan in a five minute culture?

While agencies encouraged companies to think longterm, everyone from shareholders to the media, to competitors and even their own consumers were revealing shorter and shorter attention spans. Innovation happened faster. New media were introduced faster. Celebrities, fashions, trends and technologies explode onto and fade out of our collective consciousness in a matter of months, not years.

This presents a problem for traditional tagline/positioning marketing on several fronts:

1. There’s not enough time. At the current rate of innovation many companies staking out a position through a tagline are likely to find the merits of said positioning irrelevant (from a competitive standpoint) before their marketing efforts have a chance to make the tagline ‘stick’ in our heads.
2. There’s not enough money. Ramming a tagline into someone’s head cost a lot of money back in 1980 when there were still mass channels to use. Today, to make a tagline ‘stick’ in enough people’s heads takes more and more money. Don’t believe me? Spit out then first ten taglines you can think of. Then Google them to find the dates. You might be surprised to see how many are far older than you think.
3. Not enough people are listening. Social media has given us all the chance to talk to peers about products and services. We increasingly don’t need to listen to what an advertiser says to form a perception of a brand. This hasn’t hit its tipping point yet, but as Boomers and Gen Xers age out of the marketplace, this trend will continue.

So if taglines and the traditional tactic of proclaiming your market positioning for all to hear is winding down what will replace it? It might be useful here to look at the tech sector. Of all industries, technology grapples most with a frantic pace of innovation and a lightning-fast novelty-to-parity cycle.

You might notice that many top technology names don’t bother with taglines. Apple doesn’t. Facebook doesn’t. Twitter doesn’t. Amazon doesn’t. Some that have taglines like Google (‘Don’t be evil’) don’t really use them. Other’s that do use them don’t get much from them. Do you know Adobe’s tagline? IBM’s? Cisco’s? Nokia’s? Motorola’s?

The value of values.
Maybe taglines and traditional 5-year positioning strategies aren’t helpful to technology firms. What is then? I would posit that values are the new positioning – not just for technology companies but for any enterprise.

A company’s values *should* impact every aspect of its operations from how it develops products to how it provides customer service. When a company has a clear mission and values and aligns their whole business around them, the business achieves two important tasks that are critical to surviving in a five minute culture.

First, it allows for consistency across all touch points. Few consumers ever quoted a company’s tagline in everyday conversation, even during advertising’s hayday. But by behaving consistently in accordance with the company’s values, the benefits of ‘integration’ are gained without the burden of rigidity.

That brings us to the second benefit, flexibility. A company that focuses more on aligning all aspects around its values has the ability to be nimble. If a disruptive technology comes to market, the company can apply its values in adopting or competing against it. If a new industry emerges, the company can apply its values to entering that market (provided its worth migrating to). Strong alignment around values galvanizes the enterprise, keeps it oriented during rough seas of change and allows it to go with the flow when unanticipated events alter the course of its future.

For marketing and customer outreach the ‘big idea’ and its tagline articulation will increasingly give way to a flexible, adaptive and demonstrative approach to engagement that has less to do with features, benefits or claims and more to do with the values an enterprise holds and how it expresses them in every detail of its operations.