Tagline (strapline)
The short phrase that stays with your brand for years, unlike a campaign line that changes every season.
See it
What it is
A tagline is the short phrase attached to the brand rather than to a campaign, and it is written to last years. Nike has run hundreds of campaigns and one tagline since 1988. Taglines do get retired and replaced when the strategy moves, so 'durable' is the standard, not 'permanent'. The test is durability: if the line only makes sense alongside this quarter's ad, it is a campaign line, and campaign lines should never get locked under the logo.
Reach for one when the name alone does not say what you do ('Slack' needs help, 'Bank of America' does not) or when you want to claim a feeling the category has not claimed yet. Two to six words is the working range. Say it out loud: taglines are heard more than read, and anything you stumble over dies on a radio spot.
Two traps. First, people confuse the tagline with the positioning statement, which is the internal sentence about audience and difference; the tagline is the public, memorable compression of it. Second, a tagline does not have to live in the logo at all. Plenty of brands keep it in headlines, ads, and packaging and leave the lockup clean. If you do lock it into a brand signature, it has to survive being set at 10px under the wordmark, so a line that needs two stacked rows to breathe will get dropped by every designer who uses it.
Ask AI for it
Write 12 candidate taglines for [brand], which does [one-line description] for [audience]. Constraints: 2 to 6 words, no gerund openers ('Empowering', 'Unlocking', 'Reimagining'), no puns on the brand name, no words the whole category already uses, and it must still make sense in five years with no campaign around it. Group them into three angles: what we do, how it feels, what we refuse to do. For the strongest three, show the lockup: wordmark on top, tagline set below at roughly 30 percent of the wordmark width, matched letter spacing, one clear line of space between them.