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Build a Lasting Impression
Posted: April 3, 2018 | News & Email Blasts
Build a Lasting Impression
The Four Quadrants of a Tagline’s Creation
A few years ago, Steven Label started a journey to define the guiding principles of our organization by creating an exceptional tagline.
This process began when the President of Steven Label, Steve Stong, attended a conference and listened to the speaker extol the value of creating a tagline of excellence.
This created a new inspiration to redefine our company’s tagline. Over a period of several weeks we assembled a cross functional group of employees – who provided valuable feedback and input, that ultimately lead us to construct the tagline developed for the company.
This process started with some obvious steps:
• Defining what a tagline is – a phrase that embodies our corporations, employees’ and customers’ attitudes, standards and motivations
• Identifying successful taglines, we admire – like Apple’s Think Different or Ford’s Quality is Job #1 and Life at 100% known for the battery chargers at Starbucks
• Exploring competitors taglines
• Narrowing down key words, thoughts and phrases we desired to express
So, over the next few weeks we collected hundreds of words and phrases from employees and management.
And this is where the Four Quadrant test, comes in to play.
The Four Quadrants separate how our tagline speaks to:
• Me, personally
• Them, personally
• Us, corporately
• Them, corporately
In addition, each word needed to speak to all Four Quadrants as a whole, as well as to each individual quadrant. This illustrates the process:
This method allowed us to qualify (or disqualify) each word to ensure every word in our tagline would mean something personally – both to the individual employee and the individual customer. . . and to Steven Label and our customers’ corporately.
And here is the end result . . . our tagline!
Build a Lasting Impression
Let’s take a look how each word in our tagline speaks perfectly into the Four Quadrants.
Build – We are a manufacturer and we build things – labels, membrane switches, product instructions, etc. It is a creative and practical process that we take pride in. We purposely chose an imperative mood as the verb in our tagline because it suggests an ongoing action, not a passive or aspiring action.
Lasting – Merriam-Webster defines lasting as “having an existence or validity that does not change or diminish.” Not only does Steven Label strive to build products that last, but we desire to leave our mark on this world with eco-friendly ideals and people-inspiring programs – like our ongoing support for awesome organizations like Free Wheelchair Mission – watch their inspiring video here https://www.freewheelchairmission.org/.
Impression – In essence, we are printers that use presses which print impressions, so the wordplay that comes with impression is obvious as a printer. But beyond that, our employees strive to make an impression with each customer interaction. We leave an impression on our customers with each phone call, the quality of our products, on-time delivery all the way to the way we package and complete our paperwork for each shipment. It’s our job to make a mark by building excellence each and every day in all that we do. In turn, our customers can produce their life-changing, joy-giving products, with the support and products we build for them.
Perhaps most importantly, the team aspect we incorporated into this process, makes our tagline particularly meaningful to us. We love to talk about it and we’re proud of the great story and meaning behind each and every word.
It appeals to our humanity, as well as our skill and continued focus on organizational excellence, we strive to Build a Lasting Impression every day, with the Steven Label Companies.
