The Evolution of a Tag Line

Since we launched our new website in the beginning of July I’ve heard from so many people about our new tagline: “Every act of business can be an act of love.”

Most persistently we’ve heard from clients who protest, “I love it! And it doesn’t follow the structure you teach! What gives?”

Mmm… It’s true, it’s not a Who-Who-What statement as described in “The Heart-Centered Answer to What Do You Do?”

Let’s talk about the purpose of a tag line first.

Tag Line, Shmag-Line, As Long As You’re Listening

Here’s what a tag line is NOT supposed to do. Upon hearing your tagline, potential clients will NOT:

• Know every last detail of all 42 super-cool modalities you know.
• Think the stars stopped in their paths and the heavens opened up.
• Become your client and buy from you, just like that.

The main trouble with most taglines is that people put WAY too much responsibility onto the poor tagline’s shoulders. It can’t stop a speeding train, or leap tall buildings in a single bound. It has one very simply function, and that’s what it does.

You ready? Here’s the tagline’s one simply function: To help someone see themselves in it.

The way I had been teaching it is, in essence, in that free workbook I linked to above. However, there is more to the story. Which means I need to introduce you, once more, to Isabel Parlett.

Strategic Versus Expressive

Some months ago, after nearly ten years in business, I knew I had to update and clarify our message. So much had changed in a decade that, even though we were doing essentially the same work, it had developed, grown, and progressed in many ways.

Also, the market had changed. In 2001, when Heart of Business launched, spirituality in business wasn’t spoken about nearly as openly as it is now. There is an openness that is incredibly, compared to where I came from.

Isabel, who is a sheer genius when it comes to messaging, had a fantastic distinction for me: Expressive versus strategic. The tagline I had used for nine years, “For small business owners who want to make a difference and need to make a profit,” was what she called “strategic.”

Strategic, and I’ll probably botch her words on it, is when you are focused on the client. You talk about them and who they are and what they need. A very, very powerful way to express your business. That’s what the Who-Who-What is, and it’s been a proven approach not only for thousands of our clients, but throughout the history of marketing.

Expressive is when you are expressing the deep reality of who you are and what you are bringing. I have often urged clients to avoid this mainly because it’s very easy to get caught in the language of the heart and end up with something that sounds pretty and flowery and beautiful, but is missing the concrete groundedness that will actually bring you clients.

Our new tagline, “Every act of business can be an act of love,” is a phrase I said in the first fifteen minutes of my conversation with Isabel in response to her insightful, smart, incisive questions. After the hour was up, we realized that phrase was it.

And it’s an expressive tagline. And it works, even though it’s not strategic. Why does it work?

When An Expressive Tagline Can Work

An expressive tagline can work when you know your strategic message. When you know your Who-Who-What, and the rest of your marketing message is crafted around speaking to Who you help and What you help them with, then the expressive tagline lifts the heart without being ungrounded.

Everything about the Heart of Business website is written and designed with the knowledge that we are having a conversation with you as a small business owner who wants to make a difference in the world and still needs to make money doing it.

When you are a visionary, it can be tempting to go straight for the expressive message. And it can be very nourishing to you to know it. However, I want to urge you not to stop with the expressive message.

Even Isabel would agree with me. 🙂

In fact, I had Isabel share three tips to move towards an expressive tag line. Here’s what she wrote:

Tips for an Expressive Tagline From Isabel

1. Before you can have an Expressive Tagline, you need to know your Core Message.

The funny thing about Mark’s tagline is that we didn’t set out to create a tag line.

My first step, always, is to help people put words to the biggest, deepest message that they are here to share. What I call the True Spirit of your Work, and what most of the world calls your Core Message. If you want powerful, compelling business language for anything, you need to know this first. Without it, you can get pulled off center by your perception of what people want from you.

So, when Mark came to me saying he wanted to have a more explicitly spiritual message, I wanted to capture what that message was, for him, before worrying about how it would land with the audience. As I pressed Mark to tell me what that more spiritual message was, we downloaded that phrase “every act of business can be an act of love” very quickly.

It was only once we had it, and confirmed that it was, in fact, the most important message that Mark wanted to share through this work, that we could start to consider how it was going to land. It was a happy accident that the Core Message we put together worked beautifully as a tagline.

2. Know When It’s Time to Be More Expressive than Strategic

Like Mark, I usually recommend that your elevator speech and tagline follow what I call the “hey you!” principle, meaning that when someone hears it, they know that you’re talking to them. (I like to tell a story about how sometimes my husband is in the house talking to me, but he doesn’t really have my attention until the moment he says, “hey, Isabel.”).

It can be helpful to think of your elevator speech, and tag line being 80-95% about who your audience is and what they want (the who-who-what), and just 5-20% about your special, innovative, original insight or magic or point of view. That way, you get the strategic job done, but still get to play and express yourself, just a bit.

If you are just sorting out who you are in business and who you can serve, if you are just getting started figuring out the offers you can make that will be joyfully received, it may not be the best time to go with a more expressive tagline.

The right time for the more expressive tagline is when you feel that deep calling to step out with a more personal, spiritual, or radical message. When you are willing to risk how you are received or perceived. And when you can have a strong enough reputation and revenue-base that you can afford to take those risks.

So Mark, simply put, is in a great position to break the rules at this stage of his business.

3. Use Simple Words to Express Your Complex or Unusual Ideas

One of the things I love about the line “every act of business can be an act of love” is that the concept itself is pretty radical, but the words themselves are simple and easy to understand.

I love complexity, metaphor, poetry, and big words. But, in the wrong context, they create distance instead of understanding.

Taglines, and elevator speeches are what I call get-people-in-the-door language. They are meant to invite your right people in and assure them they are in the right place, and earn you the right to tell a longer, more complex story.

The test of the power of your message is your ability to express it using simple, every day words that any young adult would understand. Avoid jargon, whether technical or personal development. Use restraint with abstract words like “empowerment” or “coherence” or even “synergy.”

My guideline? The intelligent 12-year old test. How would you communicate your idea to an intelligent 12-year old? They have a decent vocabulary, a capacity to understand abstract ideas, but limited experience traveling in the world. If you can explain your idea to them, you can probably explain it to anyone.

How about you? Is your tagline more expressive or strategic? And do you need to balance it out?

p.s. Check out our training programs- they start at free.

Need your business to work, and refuse to sacrifice your heart in the process? Maybe Heart of Business is just what you’ve been looking for.

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