Taglines & claims

A tagline earns its place or it takes up space

The test is simple and most lines fail it: could a competitor put their logo under this and have it still make sense? If so, it is not a tagline, it is a mood. What makes a line work is a specific idea, held long enough that customers learn it, expressed in words a person would actually say.

Length is not the point; ownability is. A short line nobody can distinguish from three others in the category is worse than a longer one that could only belong to you. And the line has to age: a tagline tied to this season's campaign will be replaced within a year, and the equity resets with it.

What we work on, and what each one is for

Short-form messaging is a family, not a single line, and each member does a different job:

• The Brand Tagline: The enduring line beside the logo, expressing what the brand stands for rather than what it is currently selling.
• Campaign Lines: Written to expire. They carry a season, a launch or a collection and are free to be bolder than the tagline.
• Product Claims: Specific and substantiated: what it does, how much, how fast, proven how.
• Pack Copy Hierarchy: Which claim leads on front of pack, what supports it on the back, and what is legally required to sit beside it.
• Value Propositions: The longer statement a sales team or a retail buyer needs, from which the shorter lines are cut down.
• Boilerplate: The paragraph that describes the company in every press release, so the brand is not reintroduced differently each time.

Deciding which of these a piece of work needs is half the job. Most briefs that ask for a tagline are really asking for a campaign line, and the two are written under completely different constraints.

Claims have to be true, and provably so

In beauty and personal care a claim is regulated. Performance language, ingredient claims, sustainability wording and comparative statements each carry their own rules, and those rules differ between the EU, the UK and the markets a brand exports to.

So claims are written against evidence, not around it. What the study actually measured, on how many people, over what period, and what wording that supports. A claim that has to be softened after legal review was written the wrong way round, and the softened version is usually the weaker line as well as the later one.

How DUTCH DESIGN AGENCY writes short-form

We write long before we write short. The strongest lines are almost always compressed from a fuller argument, because a short line arrived at directly tends to be a phrase in search of a meaning rather than a meaning that found its phrase.

Candidates are then pressured. Read aloud, set in the real typeface at the real size, placed on a pack and in a campaign, and put next to competitors' lines to see whether it still stands apart. Anything that only works in a presentation is discarded.

What you receive is a recommended line with the reasoning behind it, a small set of alternatives that make genuinely different arguments, the claim set with its supporting evidence noted, and guidance on where each line is used and where it must not be.

Why work with DUTCH DESIGN AGENCY?

We write for beauty, fashion and lifestyle brands, where a claim has to clear regulation and a tagline has to survive translation into three languages without becoming a different promise. Writing for those constraints from the start is what produces a line that ships.

Let's find the line your brand can hold for years.

Book a discovery call.