Recently, I was thinking about a tag line for a client. The more I thought about the good tag lines I’ve seen and heard, and that others cite as some of the best, the more I realized that nearly all of them were business-to-consumer (B2C). Businesses whose products/services are marketed to other businesses (B2B) have a harder time coming up with effective tag lines. The fact is that most of them out there are just plain boring and pointless.

OK, let’s go straight to law firms.  Let’s say you’re a high-end firm (not looking for 18-wheeler wreck personal injury claims, traffic tickets, or divorce work), and your target audience is General Counsel at mid-size to large corporations. What are you going to say in a tag line that will make this fact-driven, no-form-of advertising-has-any effect-on-me, audience of attorneys sit up and take notice and even believe your law firm may be different from the dozens of other firms that pitch them for business all the time?

Yes, you can take the good advice of those who tell us to test, test, test those tag lines. But really, you can try stuff out only on your best clients – the ones who like you well enough to respond to an inquiry or participate in a study. But they already know something about you and probably like you, making them less than the ideal participants in a study. Any mass query of GCs who don’t know you will get very little response.

Here’s a list of some.

Except for one, They’re nearly all meaningless junk. That one says, “We keep our clients out of jail.” I like that one; it’s direct and meaningful. I suspect, though, that the audience likely influenced by that tag line is an audience for whom the tag line doesn’t always prove true.

Consider these:

• Leadership. Creativity. Results
• Counsel to market leaders
• Legal counsel to great companies
• The advantage of focus

Law Firm Tag Line

Here’s a great one. “Experience Innovation.” What on earth does that mean? These lawyers do things in ways that other lawyers don’t know about and have never tried? Really?

I’m sorry, I dozed off for a minute. Give me a break! What law firm couldn’t or wouldn’t say the same things? Guys, get the 25-lawyer committee together and try again. Just kidding, don’t bother. Your marketing guy has a delete key – allow him to use it.

What I really suspect is that an all-purpose tag line for this audience is a waste of time. Don’t bother putting this stuff on your web site unless you just have space to fill and nothing interesting to fill it with. Don’t put it on your letterhead, your invoices, or anywhere else. But if you’re doing something like developing a campaign targeting a very a specific market — say architectural firms for example — then it should be very possible to develop an effective branding tagline for that market for use in that campaign.