Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Funny Business Slogans Are Sticky Business Slogans

Funny Business Slogans Are Sticky Business Slogans

Even if you're not a professional marketing person chances are you're more of an expert on advertising than you think. After all, you have been bombarded by ads your entire life via every medium known to man. For this reason, if you're a small business owner about to search for and select a business slogan for your company, take a week and attempt to come up with one yourself before you spend money on the services of an expensive copywriter or advertising firm. It only takes one inspired moment to come up with a phrase that will work on all of your marketing materials and advertising campaigns, for years to come. Why not aim for a funny business slogan to accomplish this? Humor is one of the best ways to grab people, momentarily disarm them and defuse the barriers we all put up against advertising generally. It's an advertising heist, and you only need to steal their attention for a moment.

One way to come up with funny business slogans is to gather a list of famous ones you have heard over the years, for inspiration. It can be instructive to see what has worked in million-dollar advertising campaigns, as shown by what still lingers in your mind even decades after a given ad or a television commercial stopped running.

For example, remember the elderly lady in the Wendy's commercial from years ago? "Where's the beef?" she would bellow, and the message was clear for a company that wanted to emphasize quality in its offerings as compared to the competition. The reason the slogan worked was because the initial hilarity of it demanded that you understood its context, and by the time you did it had made the desired impression upon you. This slogan went "viral" before the term even existed. It gained a foothold in the general public consciousness for years and you can't, as they say, buy publicity like that.

Another enormously successful ad campaigns in the 1970s was the Alka-Seltzer TV commercial where the man with indigestion painfully intones "I can't believe I ate the whole thing!" It was another bit of genius marketing that could not fail to leave you smiling, and it also went quickly into the catchy, well-known phrases of the time.

So where does this leave you, the small business owner today? If you can come up with a funny business slogan that people cannot ignore, even for the four or five seconds it takes to read or hear it, you can create an indelible impression upon members of the general public that have never heard of your business. What both of these examples show is that you can appropriate a phrase that already exists and bend it for usage in an amusing way for your company.

You have a tree trimming business? "We go out on a limb for you." You want to advertise your optometry business? "You should see what you're missing." The point is that you can recycle existing tag lines, and even if the pun or wordplay is not falling-down funny, it is clever enough to temporarily grab the attention of people listen to the radio or driving by your sign.

Have lunch with a couple of witty friends of yours and I'll bet you could come up with a short list of half a dozen really engaging, funny business slogans. Then the fun begins. I would suggest running a Google AdWords campaign to determine with scientific precision what phrases best grab attention. The point here is that you may very well have the ability to dream up your own effective business tagline. Give it a shot: there is a business for every slogan.

Funny Business Slogans Are Sticky Business Slogans

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