A tagline for Lucky Strike

Written by verbal identity and branding specialist Phil Ramsell, joint founder of Sticky Name Design and native English copywriter & creative director based in Hamburg, Germany

Taglines are a Holy Grail of branding. Alongside your brand name, your tagline, strapline or claim helps make that vital first impression that either gets you noticed or doesn’t. And more to the point: gets you remembered for the right or wrong reasons. So what your tagline says, how it says it and how it works together with your brand name are at the absolute core of your brand’s identity.

The quest for the perfect tagline

Finding a tagline to position a brand in the sweetspot of where it needs to be so it will stand out from competitors and win over the hearts and minds of consumers is no easy task at the best of times. But when you’re in the business of selling cigarettes during one of the most disruptive times in that industry’s history, the nature of that quest becomes infinitely more challenging.

In one of Mad Men’s most memorable pitch scenes, this is the situation facing Creative Director, Don Draper as he prepares to present a new tagline to his agency’s biggest client: Lucky Strike. Watch the video below to find out how he handles this defining challenge in the show’s very first episode, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”.

So what makes a great tagline?

If there’s a lesson to be learned from this scene, it’s that the power of a tagline is totally dependent on the strategic insight behind it. So getting that right is just as important as finding the right words to express the unique idea that it informs, arguably more so. As taglines go, ‘It’s Toasted’ is certainly no linguistic work of art. By the Lucky Strike clients’ own admission, it doesn’t even articulate a unique benefit of their product, because “everybody else’s tobacco is also toasted”. It’s the strategic insight behind it that makes it unique.

In a marketplace where all Lucky Strike’s competitors are still fighting a losing battle to communicate why their cigarettes won’t kill you, Don Draper’s genius shines through in recognising the opportunity this presents to change the entire brandscape with just two words. “It’s Toasted” is a tagline that allows Lucky Strike to walk away from a destructive war it can never win, clearly reposition its brand in a very ‘ownable’ new territory (one that any of its competitors could have claimed, but didn’t) and re-engage with consumers in an infinitely more positive way. An unforgettable pitch of “the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal” indeed.

The real story behind that Lucky Strike tagline

And finally, for any of you curious to know how this fictional Mad Men pitch differs from the real story behind Lucky Strike’s “It’s Toasted” tagline, we can highly recommend reading the following blog post by Sarah Vogelsong: http://www.sarahvogelsong.com/blog/2018/1/29/its-toasted