How to create a brand tagline with AI (and make sure it's memorable, authentic and inspiring)

No more slogging through hours of painful brainstorming
For copywriters, marketers and founders
Takes just 5 minutes

Taglines are one of those “ethereal” but also critical pieces of a brand’s messaging strategy. They represent the essence of your brand. That’s why writing one is hard. And it requires you to go through hundreds of crappy ones before you strike gold.

And if you’ve ever tried, at some point you’ve likely ended up either packing too many ideas or making them too generic, not emotional enough or too “trendy” for your own good.

Writing great taglines requires you to get intimate with the brand’s vision, mission and values. And with its target audience. Which typically = lots of research.

But, it’s the age of AI, and with some help, our tools can shortcut the process.

Here’s what to do: Prompt AI to generate tagline ideas for you. This is what ChatGPT created for me (for a coffee company) when I used the AI copywriting prompts I’m about to teach you:

Here’s how to use CHatGPT 4 to get similar results for your business or client.

Step 1: Give ChatGPT the copywriter’s role

In order to get better results from ChatGPT, it’s important to instruct it on how to act. In our case, a copywriter (duh).

At the same time we’re also adding in the first hint of our goal for this prompt.

In ChatGPT 4, write the following prompt:

Prompting ChatGPT for tagline ideas as a copywriter

Copy paste this prompt:

You are a conversion copywriter, expert in decision making, persuasion, psychology, behavioral economics, marketing, sales, UX design, customer experience, branding, and conversion rate optimization. Pretend that you are also highly empathetic and understand how people think and what makes them tick. You can easily and expertly detect human behavior, thoughts, and needs based on language. You are also highly skilled in using criminal and intelligence investigation techniques to understand and analyze buying behavior and decision-making processes.

I'm going to share information about a company so you can write 50 tagline ideas for me. Wait for the information and for now, just let me know you got it.

ChatGPT will reply with “I got it” for now.

Next, we’re going to feed ChatGPT with information about the brand. Since taglines need to be authentic, in line with the brand’s image, and as memorable as possible, we’re going to rely on the brand’s story, mission, vision and values to get our ideas. We can also share the About page copy if we have it, as that’s where you typically find the narrative behind why the brand exists.

If you’re a copywriter and haven’t done it yet, this is a great time to interview your client and extract as much information as possible from their heads.

For our test, we’re going to use exhalecoffee.com as an example. Their current tagline seems to be “Ridiculously healthy coffee.” Maybe we can do better.

In ChatGPT, copy-paste the following prompt along with the information you have on the brand:

Copy paste this prompt:

Here's the information, with this, write 50 compelling, memorable and authentic tagline ideas for a [CATEGORY/PRODUCT] company called [COMPANY NAME].

[PASTE BRAND'S INFORMATION HERE]

In my case I was able to collect around 1800 words of copy from the company’s About us page and from an article they wrote.

in just a few seconds, ChatGPT returned my 50 tagline ideas:

Some of my favorites:

“Breathe Deep, Sip Slowly, Live Fully.”
“Crafted for Health, Brewed for Taste.”
“From Soil to Soul: Coffee for Wellness.”
“The Healthy Heart of Coffee.”
“From Bean to Being: Coffee for Life.”
“Awaken Your Best Self.”
“Coffee, the Way Nature Intended.”
“Sip Into Your Best Life.”

You could even test limiting the number of words in the taglines and introduce some constraints like having it use specific words.

We might not win an award, but these are great starting points.

Here’s the full chat for you to dig in (in it you’ll also find my test using the below bonus prompt to get even more ideas).

Bonus: How to write taglines without any information about the brand

Now you might ask, “What if I don’t have enough (or any) copy about the brand yet?” In that case some good ‘ole tagline formulas might come in handy.

We’ll simply instruct ChatGPT to wear the shoes of a copywriter and then ask it to generate tagline ideas based on proven formulas and examples.

Use the following prompt (consider this a new chat, so we’ll repeat our copywriter’s role prompt):

Copy paste this prompt:

You are a conversion copywriter, expert in decision making, persuasion, psychology, behavioral economics, marketing, sales, UX design, customer experience, branding, and conversion rate optimization. Pretend that you are also highly empathetic and understand how people think and what makes them tick. You can easily and expertly detect human behavior, thoughts, and needs based on language. You are also highly skilled in using criminal and intelligence investigation techniques to understand and analyze buying behavior and decision-making processes.

Write 50 compelling, memorable and authentic tagline ideas for a sustainable coffee company called Exhale Coffee using the following formulas:

[COPY-PASTE FORMULAS FROM THIS ARTICLE]

And like magic, ChatGPT provided the ideas we needed:

ChatGPT tagline ideas following formulas

Take a look at all of them in the full chat.

I tried this AI prompt for a SaaS business. Here’s what happened.

I wanted to see how ChatGPT performed when asked to come up with taglines for a SaaS, rather than an ecommerce company. So I headed to ClickUp’s website and fed it their About us page copy following Steps 1 and 2 above.

Here’s a couple of the results: