January 1996: All About Slogans

                                                                                                      lliana Mihaleva

Here’s my New Year’s resolve: To rid the world of slogans. Not slogans like “The Buck Stops Here” (that’s a fine one) or “Loose Lips Sink Ships” (sort of a fine one), but the slogans you find plastered throughout the offices of corporate America, that you find peddled in the ads of men’s magazines whose demographics appeal to managers who crave the enrichment of slogans to help them define themselves—a quick fix, as it were—because (you see) they have difficulty letting you know who they are or telling you exactly what it is they do or telling you what you may think it is they do.

Slogans are the smile faces of the millennium; the bumper stickers of the boardroom. We’ve replaced what we used to learn in school, at home and at work with modern-day Aesopian morals, beautifully printed and framed and hanging everywhere, Big-Brotherlike (this is who and what we are and what we want you to be). They are supposed to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy, yet do little to boost productivity, morale or excite performance. They are, matter of fact, upon close examination, rather depressing. How about this enhancement: “The true reward of a thing done well is to have done it.” Words to live by.

Restaurateurs I love and respect have told me (no kidding around) that they use slogans as part of their training programs. They frame and hang them all over: from the lobby to the restrooms, slogans galore. I’ve been told some managers use them instead of a training program. “Wanna know what we’re all about?” a restaurant manager asks me. “Check this out,” she says, pointing to a slogan hanging above the employee timeclock: “A day without smiling is like a day without sunshine.” You read a slogan once, that’s it. Reading it twice or more doesn’t impress the impression more or make you more aware of what it is you should be doing (“smile, or else”). It certainly is no substitute for training.

Regardless of how vapid slogans are and how ineffective they are at communicating anything substantial, don’t lose sight of this: men love slogans, women don’t care. Men need slogans, women don’t. Women express sentiments better than men. It’s a communication thing. Women say, “I’m sorry.” Men need something cribbed from a greeting card, a slogan.  If you ever see anything like the following in the office of a woman, call the paramedics—it’s apparent her estrogen has been strangled by an overdose of testosterone. Here it is: over her desk hangs a picture. It’s a lovely photograph of mountains, a lake, a sunset, and a bird with a generous wingspan. Printed across the photo in a typeface that would make a calligrapher weep is this: “Soar With Eagles.”

If your restaurant is cluttered with slogans, take them down, except one: “Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning To Work.” Slogans are for the birds (not a bad slogan, by the way).

Next month: mission statements. I feel about them as I do slogans. But, if you think you ought to have one, here’s the best one I know of. A friend of mine saw it at the Mustang Ranch, needle-pointed (quaint, I thought) and framed: “Our mission is to make you ecstatically happy and us some money.”

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