Never, ever, believe anyone who says that creating a tagline or slogan or positioning statement is easy.

It can’t be since it is a massive challenge to condense your message to a succinct 2 – 10 words that express your heart and soul and value proposition.

Crafting a what, how and why proclamation takes mental sweat.

So, it is extremely honest of PledgeMe founder Anna Guenther to state it took three years for the crowdfunding platform to nail its own slogan. She was speaking at a recent Deloitte Private after work function.

PledgeMe’s tagline is:

‘Helping Kiwis fund the things they care about’

A simple, emotional and appealing tagline

The tagline obeys the requirements of being simple, emotional and appealing. If Anna uses the expression, people immediately understand what PledgeMe is about and follow up with a question.

They ask ‘tell me more’, rather than screwing their face up and going ‘what?’.

I’d like to think that Punchline’s co-design process, working in the trenches with the client, rather than sitting on a cloud and dreaming something up, would have come up with something similar…and taken days rather than years.

Punchline leads with question-storming, and understands you’re trying to start your story as cleanly and empathetically and metaphorically as possible. This removes the temptation to create a waffly and generic phrase that could equally apply to an IT company or widget-maker.

Now businesses can carry out their own trial-and-error slogan-creation process, but it is almost invariably quicker and cheaper to have it facilitated by an outsider.

Someone from without rather than within is more likely to sort the wood from the trees, to be able to see the big picture.

That’s because too much knowledge, too much intimacy with a product or service removes the detachment required to give what you do a name and description.

However, PledgeMe has, eventually, collared its own million dollar message.

‘Helping Kiwis fund the things they care about’ works equally well as a barbeque ‘what do you do?’ question, and as the first thing you read on their website.

Having a statement that your own people are more than happy to use in a social setting is the ultimate truth test for an organisation.

PledgeMe passes the inspection with flying colours.