Tagline development: Distillations of creative strategy

Taking creative strategy and distilling it into evocative, memorable, pithy taglines that serve the business goals is a critical part of brand development. Below are some tags that I developed and were enshrined by the various brands.

Turo: Find your drive

Learn more about the development of “Find your drive” in this in-depth look at the Turo brand refresh.

Turo: Way better than a rental car

Coming out of a 2015 rebrand with the tagline, “Rent the car, own the adventure”, Turo needed to reposition the tag in such a way that the brand wasn’t equated with traditional rental car business models. In the throes of regulatory battles because of frequent attacks from Enterprise, Turo needed a tagline that didn’t suggest that we “rent” out cars, but rather our hosts share their cars in a model completely different and separate from the traditional rental car industry. It’s not a staid, dry, commodified rental car experience — you can choose the car you want, you book directly from a real person, à la Airbnb, and you can skip the lines and hidden fees at the rental counter. With Turo, you get a unique, unscripted, authentic experience. You can drive cooler cars. You generally pay less, and can enjoy the convenience of booking from your phone. Turo is way better than a rental car, with the added strategic benefit of maintaining that coveted “rental car” keyword to maintain our competitiveness against those big business bullies at Enterprise.

Nexant: Reimagine tomorrow

Contracted by my former creative director to help out with a rebranding project, I helped Nexant position itself as the forward-thinking futuremaker it perceived itself to be. A service provider and software company serving the utility and energy industries, they were enabling innovators to create a brighter tomorrow. With that aspirational, constructive spirit underpinning the creative direction, I developed the tagline “Reimagine tomorrow” in 2015, and it’s still being used to date.

Impact shopping: Spend with benefits

The (I believe) now-defunct brand, “Impact Shopping”, was a platform wherein interest groups — schools, affinity groups, NGOs, etc. — could partner with retailers such that a percentage of all sales purchased through the group’s affiliate link would go to benefit the group. Essentially, part of each sale would be donated by the retailer.

Tasked with generating a tagline that would describe the benefit of the business while also grabbing a customer’s attention, I developed the tagline “Spend with benefits”, which states the benefit while also playing off the wordplay and rhetorical effect of the ubiquitous term “Friends with benefits” — borrowing its melody and familiarity to roll off the tongue.