A catchy phrase for your business can make the difference between little sales and a lot of sales. A sleek, precise, and to the point slogan should stick in your customer’s minds. We know many of them.

Here are some for example:

1. Nike - “Just Do It”
2. PayPal - “Privacy is Built in”
3. McDonald’s - “Over 10,000,000 Served”
4. Famillies.com - “The best family-related resource library…”

Those are just a few off of the top of my head. A slogan is just as important to a business as an eye catching logo and superior service. It needs to get the point across in milliseconds. A lot of businesses will pay a copywriter to come up with the appropriate slogan for them. For another example, my business, Writer’s Success, is geared towards freelance writers or those who want to become freelance writers. My slogan is “Write. Market. Sell.”. It gets the point across fast to those who read it. You want to write, you need to market your work, and then you need to sell it!

According to Answers.com, a slogan is:

1. A phrase expressing the aims or nature of an enterprise, organization, or candidate; a motto.
2. A phrase used repeatedly, as in advertising or promotion: “all the slogans and shibboleths coined out of the ideals of the peoples for the uses of imperialism” (Margaret Sanger).
3. A battle cry of a Scottish clan.
One woman built her business completely around a slogan. Her name is Karen Spitzer. She is a nice example of how easy a business can be created, as long as it’s built with a fantastic slogan. Karen is a fashion entrepreneur whose only tools are a laptop and her imagination!

She had a great idea for a home based business and started, No-Time, where she sells bracelets, armbands, and mouse pads, among many other items. Every item is branded with the slogan in a variety of terms. Every phrase begins with the famous “No time”. Some of her bracelets she sells say “no time for boys”, and “no time to shop”. Her mouse pads say “no time for spam”. She sells an assortment of lapel pins, temporary tattoos, and arm bands. She has sticky notes that read “no time to type”, and arm bands that say “no time for war”.

Her business has been built on her simple, copyrighted slogan, “No Time”. From an article in Wired News, she told the writer, “People identify with the project. They are just words, but it has a life of its own”.

Tools Karen uses for her business:

12-inch iBook Laptop
Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator
Quark’s QuarkXPress
Myob’s AccountEdge.

How did Karen come up with “No Time”?

She tells Wired News, “Society moves really fast. People forget to make time to do things, even getting sick. People take headache medicine when they just need to rest”.

When she was working for an Internet startup, she began to realize she wasn’t making time for herself. She had created some paper “no time” bracelets for an art gallery. She was asked by the Paris store to make them for retail sale. When one store led to another, she dumped her day job to concentrate on her increasing business.

In her last comment to Wired News, she says, “One of the reasons I quit is because I wanted my own schedule. The irony is, now I have no time for a vacation”.

You can visit No Time at http://www.no-time.com

More Resources:

http://www.businessballs.com/brainstorming.htm

http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/brainstorming.html

http://www.jpb.com/creative/brainstorming.php

http://www.sloganizer.net/en/

http://www.allmerchants.com/Articles.Online-Business-Promotion.Slogans-Creating-and-Using-Them-In-Life-Career-and-Business.id.32603.htm