It all started this New Year, as a custom for the last 23 years 9 families have got together at New Year to see out the old and see in the new. We share in bringing food, alcohol and it is a great time to renew our friendships. An eclectic mix of ages from 9 through to, well near 60. With every decade represented. Some 30 people.

This year though was different as the assignment of party games was allocated to myself. One was a simple game I created a quiz that asked people to name the product or service based on the tagline slogan. You know the thing I mean:

“finger licking good” is…

“Just do it!” is…

The World’s Online Market place” is…

Get them all right – well… Would you believe that in teams of 3 no one got more than 11( ok so we had had a few drinks by then!. However consistently no one could tell the Tagline slogan for the digital companies. It just wasn’t known!

Mid January saw a family celebration, I dusted off the same game, with a different mixture of ages (they were younger), the same results came through. People don’t know digital company tagline slogans.

Perhaps they don’t need to…?

As one Digital Branding expert explained to me

“The tagline slogan is a function of both time and the media used to deliver the message. Traditional brands have been around for much longer, and more sophisticated in using a range of different media to raise awareness. Most digital brands are fairly new compared to Coke and John Lewis. Digital media is focussed on a fast transient engagement, sometimes not allowing the customer to dwell and understand the value of the brand. Consider Facebook and Amazon in recent years they have migrated to other media advertising platforms both to inhibit competition and to embed themselves in our minds”.

Another comment stated :

“Google has no tagline but has joined the highest echelon of brands whose name becomes the verb for which they are best known – we google for information much as we hoover the carpet – both brands live in the hallowed world beyond the tagline. eBay and Amazon take note…”

My search for empirical quantitative analysis of the value of tagline slogans has revealed very little. There appears to be no analytic research or finding that deny or collaborate the hypothesis.

So if you have quantitative information it would be great to see it. Certainly a number of branding and advertising professionals I spoke with couldn’t point me to a source of information.

Were there any other observations from this unscientific test? Yes. Yellow Pages , Coke and Mars are universally known!