Tagline Generator

What the tagline generator does

You need a line. Under a logo, on a slide, at the top of a landing page, in the bio of an account you set up twenty minutes ago and have already started resenting.

Press the button and you get one. Pull a batch and read down until something catches.

What follows is the interesting part. Taglines are not written freehand. They come in a small number of shapes, those shapes are doing something specific to the person reading them, and once you know what it is you will never read one innocently again.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. If you are hunting rather than deciding, pull a big batch.
2. Press Generate. A fresh set every time.
3. Press Copy to take the whole lot with you.

Taglines have a grammar, and there are about six of them

Read a few of the lines above and something starts to itch. They are all different and they all feel the same, and the reason is that almost every tagline ever written is one of a handful of structures with the words swapped.

Here they are. Once you see them you cannot stop.

The gerund pair. Two verbs ending in -ing, balanced across a comma, each with a noun. Creating moments, cherishing memories. Defining excellence, inspiring change. The two halves do not need to be related and usually are not. The comma is doing the arguing.

The repeated opening. Same word twice, different endings. Dare to explore, dare to dream. Rhetoric has a name for this, anaphora, and it is thousands of years old, and it turns up in scripture and speeches and every product launch you have ever sat through.

The three. Innovate, collaborate, elevate. Three items, no more, no fewer. Two feels like a list that got cut off and four feels like a meeting. Three sounds like completeness, which is why Caesar did not report that he came, saw, conquered, and then had lunch.

The where. Where dreams find their wings. Where creativity knows no bounds. This one is a sentence fragment pretending to be a place, and it works because it puts the reader somewhere without ever saying where.

The journey. From vision to reality. From X to Y, where X is what you have and Y is what you want, and the product is the arrow, which is never mentioned.

The collision. Passion meets purpose. Two abstract nouns are introduced to each other and something happens. Usually magic.

That is the genre. Six shapes and a bag of nouns.

Now for the part that explains why a genre this thin has survived a century of professional attention.

Why the shapes work on you

Look again at the three. Innovate, collaborate, elevate. All three end in the same sound.

That is not decoration, and in 2000 two psychologists proved it.

Matthew McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh ran an experiment that sounds trivial and is not. They took aphorisms, the sort of folk wisdom that rhymes, and they made two versions. The original, which rhymed. And a modified one where they swapped a single word for a synonym, so the meaning survived and the rhyme did not.

Then they asked people how accurate each statement was as a description of human behaviour.

The rhyming versions won. Same claim, same meaning, one word different, and people judged the rhyming one to be a truer description of how human beings actually behave.

Sit with what that means for a second. The participants were not asked which sounded nicer. They were asked whether it was true. And the sound of the sentence moved their answer.

The name the researchers gave it is the Keats heuristic, after the line about beauty and truth, and the explanation is processing fluency. Your brain keeps a rough note of how much effort it just spent understanding something. A sentence that rhymes goes down easier than one that does not. And it turns out that the feeling of "that was easy" is almost indistinguishable, from the inside, from the feeling of "that was right". You cannot tell the two apart, because they arrive as the same sensation, and your brain has no meter that separates ease from truth.

Rhyme is only the cleanest case. Anything that reduces effort does the same work. Alliteration. A steady rhythm. Parallel structure, where the second half of a sentence has the same shape as the first. Three beats instead of four.

Go back and reread the six shapes with that in mind. Every one of them is a fluency machine. The gerund pair is parallel structure. The repeated opening is repetition. The three is rhythm. The collision is the shortest possible sentence that still contains a verb. None of those shapes is about meaning. All of them are about making the sentence cost less to read.

A tagline is not an argument. It is a delivery mechanism for the feeling of having heard an argument.

There is one more finding and it is the one worth keeping. McGlone and Tofighbakhsh ran the study again, and this time they told the participants to judge the content and ignore the poetry.

The effect shrank.

Not gone. Smaller. Which means the trick is not a lock on your brain, it is a shortcut your brain takes when nobody is watching. Name it out loud and it partly stops working.

You have just been told. It will work on you slightly less from now on, and that is the best anyone can do.

The shape is free. The noun is the work.

So here is the practical consequence, and it is the whole game.

The shapes cost nothing. Everybody has them. Your competitor has them. The six structures above are public property and always have been, which means a shape on its own buys you exactly nothing, because the reader has met it four thousand times before breakfast.

What the shape cannot supply is a fact.

Take any line and ask one question of it: could my closest competitor put their logo on this? If yes, you have written a shape. Elevating possibilities is a shape. Turning ideas into innovations is a shape. Both are perfectly well made and both would sit under literally any logo in any industry on Earth, which means they are not saying anything, they are only sounding like they are.

The fix is not to write better shapes. It is to put something in them that only you could put there. A number. A promise. A refusal. The specific thing you do that the company down the road does not. The shape then does what the shape is for, which is making your specific claim go down easy, and now the fluency is working for a real sentence instead of standing in for one.

Two more things, cheaply.

Say it out loud before you commit. All of this lives in the ear. A line that scans on a screen and stumbles in the mouth will lose, because the mouth is where it will actually be used, by a person at a party explaining what you do.

Count the syllables. Short wins, and it is not about attention spans. Short is fluent. Every syllable you remove is effort the reader does not spend, and that unspent effort comes back to you as the feeling of being right.

Where these come from

The lines come from a set our team wrote and curated by hand, built around the structures described above. Your browser picks from them at random. Nothing you do here leaves your device.

Questions people ask

Is a tagline the same as a slogan?

Close enough for most purposes, and the industry does not agree with itself. The rough convention is that a tagline belongs to the company and lasts for years, and a slogan belongs to a campaign and gets retired with it. One is who you are, the other is what you are saying this quarter.

How long should it be?

As short as it can be while still containing something. The pressure toward brevity is not a style rule, it is the fluency effect described above: fewer syllables means less effort means more conviction. But a very short line with nothing in it is still nothing, and shortening your way to emptiness is the most common way this goes wrong.

Can I use one of these as is?

You can, and for a side project or a placeholder it will do the job. For anything you intend to keep, treat what you get as a shape you have been handed rather than an answer, and put your own specific thing into it. That is where the value was always going to come from.

Should my tagline rhyme, then?

Not necessarily, and a forced rhyme is worse than none, because the effort of noticing the strain is exactly the effort you were trying to save. Rhyme is only the easiest example of fluency to measure in a lab. Alliteration, rhythm and parallel structure do the same job and are far less likely to sound like a jingle.

How do I know if it is any good?

Two tests, both free. Read it aloud to somebody and see whether they can repeat it back an hour later. And put a competitor's name above it and see whether anything breaks. If nothing breaks, it was never yours.

Can the same line come up twice?

Not within a single draw. Ask for ten and you get ten different ones. Press again and everything is back in play.

References

1. McGlone, M. S. and Tofighbakhsh, J. (2000). Birds of a feather flock conjointly (?): Rhyme as reason in aphorisms. Psychological Science, 11(5), 424 to 428. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00282
2. McGlone, M. S. and Tofighbakhsh, J. (1999). The Keats heuristic: Rhyme as reason in aphorism interpretation. Poetics, 26(4), 235 to 244. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-422X(99)00003-0
3. Reber, R., Winkielman, P. and Schwarz, N. (1998). Effects of perceptual fluency on affective judgments. Psychological Science, 9(1), 45 to 48. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00008
4. Song, H. and Schwarz, N. (2009). If it's difficult to pronounce, it must be risky. Psychological Science, 20(2), 135 to 138. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02267.x