A Tagline…A North Star…
A tagline…the most misunderstood part of any brand. Many clients think their tagline is their brand. There’s a lot of desire to make it “catchy,” the song that gets caught in the back of your head. Taglines were big in Mad Men. Peggy was often told to bring Don “fifty taglines.” Lou liked to “start with the tagline” and “sneak up” on a strategy.
Of course, a tagline is not a brand. It is a tool for a brand.
Sometimes it is more than that. Sometimes it becomes a defacto mission statement that can galvanize the customer, yes, but also the internal team—the people who are the brand—in a way no wordsmithed mission statement or statement of eight core values could ever do.
I’m reading Tinderbox (an oral history of HBO) by James Andrew Miller. Miller’s books are uniformly great—you learn from them, but they are dishy and salacious, too. (I have also read his books on EPSN and CAA).
This is from that book:
“It’s Not TV. It’s HBO,” became much more than a tagline—it became HBO’s north star, the guiding principle it used in every area of its business. Any area that was consumer-facing—even technology—was evaluated through the prism of that tagline. If a series felt like it was something you could see on broadcast or a basic cable network, HBO wouldn’t do it, or they would execute it in a way the others could not. If a print ad looked like it would come from a network, HBO would figure out how to do it differently.
When that happens, it is magic.
The tag is the kind of thing everyone can remember and internalize. It can guide almost any decision being made at any level of the company…and 1,000s of decisions are made every hour at every company. It is more than a backbone. It is a cerebral cortex.
Imagine, if you will, the more common approach:
Sample Company-Approved Mission Statement
We will create a unique television experience that differentiates itself from the current broadcasting paradigms by leveraging technological platforms, intentionally violating established norms and empowering the creative process and those who excel at it.
So, what does this have to do with resilience?
I believe the tagline/rallying cry “it’s not TV, It’s HBO” illustrates two elements that have been shown to promote resilience in the last two, turbulent years.
First, there is no internal and external
We can’t separate internal and external communications anymore. Everything is visible. If you can’t align your internal stakeholders and make your brand a rallying cry, you will never influence those 1,000s of decisions being made every day. And, if what you use as your “north star” isn’t relevant to your customers, you’re never going to get any traction in the market.
HBO absolutely….or abso-fucking-lutely…demonstrated a lot of resilience. Not only did they survive ridiculous merger and acquisition follies among their corporate owners, but they also adapted to survive the VCR, Blockbuster, VOD, cord-cutting and streaming. One key element was everybody knew what they were.
Second, you have to decide who you are and who you aren’t
There’s an old story where a guy is about to walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope, pushing a wheelbarrow. A writer comes up and says “I believe you can do this.”
And the tightrope walker looks at him and says, “then get in the wheelbarrow.”
Most companies don’t clearly define who they are because their people don’t want to put their careers in the wheelbarrow. They think they have, but they’re only in the “our primary audience is women but our secondary audience is men” school of strategic thinking. A real strategy chooses a path and forsakes the others. If you aren’t saying “no” to something it means you have a wish, not a strategy. It takes courage.
This is incredibly important when our resilience is tested. When everything else changes, we need something that doesn’t change. A real strategy….a real identity…is a foothold that gives us the space to think and the structure that guides the next steps.
Final thing…this is a big idea executed like a big idea. That matters. Do yourself a favor and watch this: