Microsoft Taglines Score a Trifecta II

October 14, 2009 by Jerry

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In the preceding blog, you read about how Microsoft, with their venerable taglines, “Where do you want to go today?” and “Your potential, our passion,” deployed a call to action and a benefit to great effect. The taglines scored a trifecta by adding a third rhetorical device, the persuasive word, “you.”

“You.” If you do a search on bing.com for a Yale University study of persuasive words, you’ll find nearly 200,000 references to a ranked list of the top ten persuasive words. “You” leads the list. (The others, in descending order are: “Easy,” “Money,” “Save,” “Love,” “New,” “Discovery,” “Results,” “Proven,” and “Guarantee.”)

Among those many references, you’ll also find that Yale never actually conducted such a study. This first unconfirmed and unattributed reference to such a list goes all the way back to an ad in the New York Times in 1961; only later was the list attributed to Yale—again unconfirmed. Over time, the list has taken on a life of its own until now it has become a full-fledged urban legend—a vivid example of pre-web viral marketing.

Unsubstantiated or not, the persuasive power of “you” is undeniable because it addresses the end user of the statement directly. Two other notable organizational taglines that have deployed the powerful word are Burger King’s “Have it your way,” and the U.S. Army’s “Be all that you can be.” The latest addition to the “you-niverse” is Yahoo with its new $100 million global advertising campaign called “It’s You.”

As you read in two earlier blogs, President Barack Obama, a skilled orator by any standard, appreciates and deploys the power of “you.” During his election campaign, his website displayed a banner headline with the slogan, “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington . . . I’m asking you to believe in yours.” In his historic Inaugural Address, he said “you” 15 times, but he also said “us,” 23 times, “we” 62 times, and “our” 70 times. “Us,” “we,” and “our,” are words that involve the “you” of his audience, the citizens of the United States of America.

Microsoft involves its audience—the existing and potential customers of its products—with the “you” in “Where do you want to go today?” and in “Your potential, our passion.”

The first tagline ran from 1994 to 2002, the second began in 2003 and is still active today. Just before the launch of the latter slogan, the New York Times ran a long profile of the company called “Microsofter” in which Steve Ballmer “laid out a new mission statement for the company: ‘To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential.’”

The statement prompted Steve Bodow, the writer of the Times article, to comment, “This extraordinarily expansive statement was notable for how little it specifically said about software or computers. Instead, it was about values and corporate culture.” Bodow was describing a soft sell call to action, and a set of benefits.

By mixing those two features with a liberal dose of “you,” Microsoft created two picture perfect and powerful marketing brands.

Take a lesson from Microsoft, use “you” in your presentations as often as you can. In fact, if you go back to the blog on how Yahoo uses the word in its new multi-million dollar marketing campaign, you’ll find some suggestions of ways you can incorporate the word.

(NOTE: I’m flattered to say that Microsoft’s Central Marketing Group is currently running a version of this blog in their monthly internal electronic newsletter, Marketing@Microsoft.)

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