

The Uber for Startup Taglines - cakey
http://www.benshaw.me/blog/2015/04/29/uber-for-startup-taglines/

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vinceguidry
You're going to have to come up with a significantly better marketing paradigm
than positioning in order to fix this. The basic idea behind positioning is
that customer education is hard, it's much easier to piggyback onto another
company's success when it comes to telling them what you can do for them.

Burger King had it easy. They let McDonalds do all the hard work of figuring
out where to put restaurants, and Burger King just put theirs across the
street.

Taglines, being the most heavily compressed medium possible for a startup to
convey themselves, are simply that much more prone to positioning-speak. There
is exactly zero room for customer education, all you can do is position.

Personally I think the way forward is to de-emphasize taglines, and move
towards short blurbs. The startup space is entirely too crowded for USPs to
easily conveyed in a single statement. But everyone expects you to be able to
anyway.

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Angostura
You know what, Ben - when you come up with examples of how you would improve
those tag lines, I'll take the critique more seriously.

Writing a concise description of a service that gets its use across is
difficult. Comparing it to something else is natural. So let's see some
improved ones.

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sweezyjeezy
I laughed when the author listed the obvious stopwords that always come high
in these kinds of things, and then instead of just removing them, actually
tried to imply that they are meaningful.

I think it would be interesting to do some analysis on this, I don't think the
author really had enough data to do it properly though.

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lucasnemeth
Yes, that was as ridiculous as the start-up taglines.

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MAGZine
Lots of the criticism seems to revolve around gratuitous use of metaphor.

But metaphor is unavoidable in modern parlance. Case in point? I invoked
metaphor within the first sentence of this comment, totally unintentionally.
DigitalSea's comment talks about this without actually calling out metaphor,
but that's what it is. Lakoff, Johnson, and Frye talk extensively about
metaphor--it allows us "to experience one thing in terms of another." Sure,
when you smash too many concepts together, metaphor can lose it's
expressiveness--but you can say the same thing about code (what happens when
you have too many layers of indirection?).

The criticism should not be placed broadly on metaphor, but on poor use of it.
"instagram for fashion" implies a bevy of ideas and is communicative--‘lego
for data product makers’ is not.

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lucasnemeth
Remove the stop words, for god's sake. Don't do an anecdotal analysis over it,
you loose all credibility. and... ‘replaces paper patient lists for doctors in
hospitals. ’ That seems pretty clear, what's the problem with that? What on
earth is a good startup for you? Your idea?

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DigitalSea
Our brain naturally draws parallels between things when we try and rationalise
them. I think it is a fair call to call yourself the "Airbnb of X" or the
"Uber for X" \- I do agree that some people take it slightly too far and it
has the opposite effect of telling people what you're about. People can
rationalise and understand "Uber for vets" or "Airbnb for last minute hotel
cancellations" or "Snapchat meets email" \- but when you take it a step
further and combine multiple concepts into a tagline it becomes a soup bowl of
nonsense.

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xkcd-sucks
especially when the referenced companies are changing their services on an
almost-daily basis...!

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pbreit
Didn't do the one thing he should have done (and said he might): provide some
sample alternatives.

I don't mind the cliche-ish descriptions as long as they are accurate.

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t_fatus
Just loved your tagline !

