There’s an old gag where a teacher asks her class to use the word “judicious” in a sentence. One lad puts up his hand. The teacher asks him to tell the class his answer. So up he stands as he says, “Hands that judicious can feel soft as your face with mild green Fairy Liquid”.

Now we’ve got that out of the way, we can take a long hard look at company strap lines, catchphrases, tag lines or whatever it is you want to call them. The point of that opening joke was that if you get them right, they can quickly enter the public consciousness just like song lyrics or lines from iconic movies and TV shows.

What's My Line?

So let’s throw some world famous strap lines at you and see how many you know:

• Just do it

• Because you’re worth it

• Think different

• We try harder

• A diamond is forever

If you’re a clever clogs you’ll know that those are strap lines from Nike, L’Oréal, Apple, Avis and De Beers. So what are the stories behind them?

Nike

For Nike, the inspiration is actually quite sick and sinister. Gary Gilmore robbed and murdered a gas station owner and the owner of a hotel. Gilmore insisted on receiving the death penalty for his crimes. His death by firing squad took place on 17th January 1977, making him the first person for ten years to be executed in the United States. Gilmore was asked for any last words and all he uttered was, “Let’s do it”.

Twelve years later when ad exec, Dan Wieden was looking for a slogan for Nike’s trainers, he spent just 20 minutes thinking about it when all of a sudden Gilmore’s last words popped into his head. Just one slight adjustment was required and “Let’s do it” became “Just do it”. A campaign using the new slogan was launched and over the next decade, Nike’s sales rose from $877million to a whopping $9.2billion.

L’Oréal

As far as one person is concerned, L’Oréal’s strap line is a very serious statement. In the early ‘70s, ad agencies were dominated by men. Most ad campaigns came from a man’s perspective, even when the products were aimed at women. Just about every ad aimed at women seemed to be all about attracting men or pleasing men. Then along came a copy writer in New York called Ilon Spect.

Spect was a woman in a man’s world and decided – quite rightly – to make L’Oréal’s latest hair dye campaign for women, all about women and from a woman’s perspective; quite a revolutionary approach at the time. This is why she closed the ad with “Because I’m worth it”. The campaign was so successful that L’Oréal overtook Clairol as the leading hair dye manufacturer and the strap line is still used today. Everyone from Jane Fonda to Cheryl Cole has uttered those words. Or Cheryl Franando-Chiquitita or whatever she’s called this week.

Apple

What with all their iPads, iPhones, iMacs and Apple Watches; you could be forgiven for thinking that Apple has always been the coolest tech product around. However, in the late ‘90s that was not the case. In 1997 no one was buying an Apple product but the then market-leader, IBM was hoovering up the market left, right and centre with its slogan, “Think IBM”. All it took was one young art director called Craig Tanimoto to turn things around.

In order to provide the ultimate answer to IBM’s “Think IBM”, Craig’s simple response was, “Think different”. We’ll gloss over the fact that it should be “Think differently”. Despite such crimes against grammar, Apple’s stock price tripled within a year and they then launched their multi-coloured iMacs. Apple became the coolest product around and the rest is history.

Avis

Perhaps the most bizarre one of this bunch comes from Avis. Back in the early sixties the car rental company was making a loss with rivals such as Hertz taking the lion’s share of the market. Copy writer Paula Green recalled a meeting between Avis boss Robert Townsend and ad agency boss Doyle Dane Bernbach. When Bernbach asked Townsend why anyone should choose Avis over its competitors, Townsend replied, “We try harder”. Copy writer Green took this off the cuff comment and flew with it. Despite the strap line sounding rather desperate it helped turn the company’s fortunes around and soon they were making a profit for the first time in over a decade.

If you think “We try harder” is bizarre, Avis recently stopped using that strap line and now uses another. Since 2012 they’ve been going with, “It’s your space”. If anyone can help us figure out what that one means, answers on a post card to the usual address…

De Beers

Finally, for this batch of strap lines we have a bit of class and we have the oldest strap line of the bunch and possibly the most effective: De Beers. In the post-war years you’d be forgiven for thinking that most people wouldn’t have had diamonds at the top of their shopping lists. But in 1948, copy writer Frances Gerety changed the Western World’s priorities.

When Gerety was attempting to come up with a strap line for the world’s most famous diamond merchant, the answer came to her in … wait for it … a dream. Yes, we kid you not. That line was, “A diamond is forever”. Back in the ‘40s, weddings and engagements were seldom marked with diamonds in rings. The De Beers campaign changed all that and in doing so, the culture of the most important day in most people’s lives changed. The strap line became even more famous when Ian Fleming released his fourth James Bond novel in 1956, under the title “Diamonds are Forever”.

Classy Little Number

When the inevitable movie adaptation was released in 1971, it came with a classy title song by Don Black and John Barry, sung by the legendary Shirley Bassey. Diamonds, De Beers, Fleming, Bond and Bassey have since become inextricably linked with one another. In fact, prior to researching this article, some of us assumed De Beers had taken their strap line from Fleming. In fact, it existed before Fleming had even created his most iconic character.

So to what do we attribute the success of these strap lines? Some of them are clever, some are extraordinarily simple and one even commits a terrible crime against the English language. It’s time for the experts to have their say. Well, according to numerous university, marketing and journalist bods, the words “short, simple, bold, intriguing, unique, personalised and brilliant” have all been used to describe these strap lines. Rather obvious descriptions you might think but it’s worth taking such things into account if you’re ever in the position of having to think up a strap line.

Thanks for the Memory

You want something short and memorable but you also want something that can be uniformly used over all of your marketing and advertising, whilst remaining in use for years, if not decades. And if you’re lucky, your company’s strap line could end up being used in appalling school playground style jokes. It would, after all, be the judicious thing to do.

To have a look at the original SME Insider article about slogans, click here: http://www.smeinsider.com/2015/08/05/world-famous-business-slogans-explained-infographic/?utm_source=SME+Insider&utm_campaign=40cceaaa2c-06_08_2015_NL&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_eb459653cc-40cceaaa2c-15860121