If you want to get people excited about your ideas very quickly, there’s nothing to beat a short and snappy statement of your aims and beliefs (except, perhaps, offering them money).
Good sloganeering means distilling the essence of your work without reducing it to bland over-simplification.
Sloganeering doesn’t have to be about selling something. Artist Barbara Kruger uses slogans such as ‘I shop, therefore I am’, to crusade against consumerism. Her slogans are not selling anything, but they are telling us something about how we live.
Artists have long used slogans. The surrealists were among the first who set down their principles, policies and intentions in a public manifesto. In the early twentieth century, any artistic movement worth its paint had a manifesto, or a ‘call to revolution’. In stating publicly what your principles, policies and intentions are, you’re more likely to convince others to join you and help you realise your intentions.
However, for a slogan to be effective, it needs to be seen. The positioning of your slogan can make all the difference.
Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist who coined the aphorism ‘the medium is the message’, once said that content ‘has about as much importance as the stencilling on the casing of an atomic bomb’. Clearly this statement is a little extreme, but it’s also clear that an understanding of the means of delivery, as well as the content, of your message is essential.
Some of our favourite ‘positive’ slogans are:
We are what we do – in their own words ‘a new movement inspiring people to use their everyday actions to change the world.’
I’m not a plastic bag – printed on to the re-usable bag designed by Anya Hindmarch for Sainsburys. Sold for £5 and sold out in just 1 hour (now being auctioned online for between £100-£200), this designer bag sparked the anti-plastic bag trend for re-usable bags. Unfortunately it turned out not to have been quite the sustainably-made product it perhaps should have been, proving the importance of getting both the medium and the message right.
Keep calm and carry on – a wartime slogan designed to reassure the public at the outbreak of WWII, the original poster never made it into the public domain, but has since become an iconic message reproduced on posters, t-shirts, bags… We just think it’s a good rule to live by. And it looks cool.
Nobody’s as clever as everybody – borrowed from our good friend Rob, in the context of what we like to call ‘Organismic thinking’, this is a real example of a ‘call to revolution’.
People Planet Profit – the Re-Everything mantra. Coined by the great John Elkington, co-founder of SustainAbility, this is the philosophy we think all businesses should aspire to live by. To find out more about how to turn these three words into action, visit www.re-everything.com
