“I think they are singing our song”
Somewhere in the country right now, someone is on their cell phone with their head cocked to the side with one finger on the antennae saying “Can you hear me, can you hear me now.” At the same time this is happening, a man is coming up for a speech in front of a large audience and grabbing the microphone. Instead of saying, “Testing, one, two, three” he is chanting the slogan for Verizon Wireless. “Can you hear me, can you hear me now” and it is being met with laughter from the crowd and from Verizon, as they go to the bank.
The technique that they have so sweetly scored with is called the “slogan tie”. Find something common in your industry and tie your slogan to it.
Some examples of this method are common phrases, that once said, are followed by the product plug. How about saying “Pardon me” in a large group, it is almost followed by a low voiced response of “do you have any Gray Pupon?”
When you hear “Give me a break”, do you start humming “Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kitt Katt Bar” You are probably humming the song now. In fact, just after writing that, I will probably be humming it for the rest of the day.
Let’s not forget “Who you gonna call… Ghostbusters anyone? While it wasn’t a product, it was a phrase that brought a specific brand to mind.
How many times an evening is the phrase “What do you want for dinner?” or “Where do you want to go?” spoken? How much would it be worth to a company to have their name screamed by the kids in the car every time their parents said that, even if they were just finishing the slogan? That doesn’t mean that every time that restaurant would win, but how often would it be thrown on the table as an option? That would be a fantastic place to be sitting in the mind of the customer.
To use the Slogan Tie technique, make sure it is a statement that is pertinent to your business and something that a person might say when they are in the market to buy your product. A nice jingle or pitch person would be good to help push the message. Make sure to get the frequency in you need to make sure that this becomes an automatic thought when the catch phrase is heard. It takes time to do this and it requires all your marketing across the board to include this same theme. You will have to continue with this theme for a while. Change your copy but keep the same theme. Grey Pupon and Kitt Katt never changed the theme even though they changed copy. Make sure the theme is catchy and make sure the phase is common enough to get repetition or definitely pertains to your product enough that the few times it is said, they are surely in the market for your product type.
This technique is very rewarding but also can be annoying. It takes some ‘stick with it’ stamina to make it work. You are tying your company to a single phrase, possibly for life. When it works this kind of positioning is Priceless. MasterCard anyone?