Mktg - When should you ditch an advertising strapline

When should you ditch an advertising strapline ( July '14,2008, Economic Times)
The question of when to drop a strap-line that has built up traction with consumers is a vexed one for marketers. Ditching a famous phrase is a way to gain a modicum of industry fame, especially if the marketer is new to the job and wants to stamp their mark on the brand; but abandoning a heritage built up over many years is not without risks, and certainly not for the faint-hearted.Nevertheless, several well-known brands have recently decided to ditch a long-running strapline in favour of a replacement. Last week The Sunday Times changed its strapline for the first time in 17 years, from ‘The Sunday Times is the Sunday papers’ to ‘The Sunday Times. For all you are.’ This will be used first in a £3m TV, press and outdoor advertising campaign, which will run for the next seven weeks. Meanwhile Orange, which is still famed for its launch strapline ‘The future’s bright. The future’s Orange,’ will kick off a £30m campaign as part of a global ad push to introduce the line ‘I am’, the first wave of which comprises a series of statements from an individual about the people and experiences that made them who they are. Times Media’s marketing strategy, sales and marketing director, Katie Vanneck, believes that her brand’s campaign and the Orange work both reflect a change in dynamic between brands and consumers. While their previous straplines were definitive statements about the brand, the new ones recognise that in a world where consumers also produce content, they want to feel more involved in a brand’s communications.

They are much more in control and demanding of their brands and want them to be more personal to them,’ says Vanneck. The Sunday Times’ campaign is ‘not only a product truth, but an insight on our customers’, she adds. According to Vanneck, The Sunday Times’ strap came out head and shoulders above other ideas after qualitative and quantitative research, so despite its heritage, dropping the old line was not a difficult decision.Orange has not used its ‘bright’ tagline for more than two years, yet it still resonates with consumers and pops up in the news. However, according to Orange brand director Justin Billingsley, this is not a problem. He rejects the notion that ‘I am’ is a strap, referring to it as a ‘prefix’. The endline is Orange itself. ‘Our strapline is our visual identity. As an iconic brand, if we need a strapline, we’ve failed,’ argues Billingsley, dismissing O2’s ‘We’re better, connected’ and T-Mobile’s ‘Life’s for sharing’ as cliches. The beer sector has been especially good at creating popular and particularly long-lived campaigns. Stella Artois’ ‘Reassuringly expensive’ line bit the dust when it became apparent that, in an age of deep supermarket discounting, the brand no longer lived up to the claim. However, InBev, the brand’s owner, claimed the line was dropped to enable it to broaden its communication idea to cover the whole Artois family of beers. Phil Rumbol, now marketing director at Cadbury, axed the popular, long-running strapline ‘Heineken reaches the parts other beers cannot reach’ in favour of ‘How refreshing, how Heineken’ in 1998, when he oversaw the beer brand. ‘It was very familiar to consumers but had become tired,’ he says. ‘It was so well known that people had stopped “hearing” it. The brief was to come up with a more contemporary expression of the core benefit of refreshment, and the line “How Refreshing. How Heineken” came from this.’ Carlsberg, however, found a middle way and changed its long-running ‘Probably’ for ‘Carlsberg don’t do’, which Gareth Roberts, the company’s head of sponsorship, says allowed the brand to keep its existing values in place while opening a new creative avenue. Ditching a well-loved strapline is not a decision that a marketer can take lightly, but if it is not done for egotistical reasons and the change adds value, it is a gamble that can pay off.