Why a slogan is more than a sentence

A good slogan does three things at once. It's short enough to remember, sharp enough to understand, and open enough to leave room for personal interpretation.

Too short is risky: a single word can become meaningless. Too long is deadly: as soon as you have more than seven words, you're not writing a slogan any more, you're writing a subtitle.

The sharpness sits in one surprising combination. Two words that normally don't go together. A verb that's more active than you'd expect. A paradox, a promise, a challenge. 'Seriously fun' works because it brings two things together that don't like each other. Combinations like that stick because your brain pauses on them for a second longer.

The biggest mistake: people start with a list of words that fit their brand. Innovative, sustainable, connecting. Out of those words they try to build a sentence. The result always feels artificial.

Start with the moment you want to create. What should people feel when they leave? Think about the difference between how they arrived and how they leave, and what shift they make (literally or figuratively). That shift is the seed of your slogan.

Example: a company that has been pushing forward for years and finally wants to celebrate needs a different moment than a company in the middle of a transformation. The first slogan is about 'this is ours'. The second is about 'what we become next'. Both can be powerful, but not at the same time.

Good slogans use techniques that rhetoric has known for thousands of years. You don't need to name them, but you should know they exist.

Alliteration: two or three words starting with the same letter (think 'make, mean, move'). Chiasmus: reverse repetition ('ask not what your event brings you, ask what you bring your event'). Paradox: two opposites that together make something new ('seriously fun'). Contrast: small against big, old against new, soft against hard.

What these techniques have in common: they give your sentence a rhythm that the memory holds on to. A slogan without rhythm is a remark. A slogan with rhythm sticks, even when you're not consciously looking for it. Experiment with these techniques while writing and read your candidates out loud. Your ear hears immediately which ones work.

Before you release a slogan, test it on three things.

Question one: does someone who knows nothing about the company understand what kind of event this is? If not, you're too abstract. Question two: can someone who heard it repeat it five minutes later? If not, it's not sharp enough. Question three: does any friction get lost if you take a word out? If not, that word is redundant, take it out.

Test with three or four people outside the core team, but not with people who've heard it discussed for weeks: they're contaminated. Someone with fresh ears gives the sharpest feedback. If it's too hard to explain, you still have work to do. If everyone says 'yes I get it straight away', but no one is held by the line, it's too safe.

Writing a slogan feels like something anyone can do. You're working with language, you don't have to build anything. In practice, internal teams get stuck on the same words, because they're sitting too close to the organisation.

We've developed a slogan architecture in five steps: DNA extraction, event formula, rhetorical construction, validation and scoring. At each step we test dozens of options, so by the end you don't have two left but three that can really be defended.

More importantly: because we also build the concept, we know what the slogan has to carry afterwards. We don't write a slogan that only works on the save-the-date. We write a slogan that keeps holding up through the opening, the afternoon blocks, the buffet and the close. That's a different kind of slogan than an advertising line.

A good slogan is the shortest summary of where you want to go with your event. It steers the concept, sums up the DNA and afterwards becomes the line people still use a year later to refer to that moment.

We write slogans as part of a concept process or as a standalone brief if you only want that one line sharpened. Not twenty random lines in a document, but three considered options with the argument for each.

Call us on 085 401 40 14 or email hello@live-impact.nl.

Seriously fun.