Slogans

(This is the age of the slogan. They leap out at us from countless billboards, TV screens, T-shirts, bumper stickers and buttons. Politicians and minorities hector us with them; polishers of diamonds, makers of movies and slicers of bread use them to nudge and cajole. We even wear and bear slogans ourselves to proclaim our beliefs and sexual preferences. They show what we stand for and what we will not stand for.There is much feeble-minded puffery. There is also much that is lively, arresting and entertaining. Only occasionally do slogans achieve excellence or memorability or touch a popular chord. This book sets out to record a thousand or so notable examples, good and bad.What is a slogan? Richard Usborne defined it as 'a form of words for which memorability has been bought. Indeed, few of the following phrases would have arisen without bidding. Unlike those phrases from entertainment which spontaneously catch on, the success of these slogans has been engineered and encouraged. In some cases, vast sums of money have been spent to keep them before the public. They rarely contain universal truths or profound insights. They may not be true at all. The distance between a copywriter's fancy and reality can be infinite.The common denominator is that all these phrases promote a product, a cause or an idea.In strict advertising parlance, the slogan is the phrase which comes at the end of the ad and encapsulates the message. It has been said that it should never comprise more than seven words. The advertiser's devout wish is that the phrase will then continue to buzz around the consumer's head, further enforcing the mes¬sage. There are, in addition, certain advertising phrases which are generally regarded as slogans because they are associated with specific products)