What should a strapline do? Should it be jokey? Should it be serious? Should it be a memory-jogger for your business name? Should it make people think differently about you?

When I first started in advertising there were straplines everywhere, and looking at three famous straplines from the past might help to illuminate things.

My first example is: ‘Heineken Refreshes The Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach’. Jokey. Unpredictable. Quirky. Heineken simply wanted to say their beer is refreshing. How boring. Saying it ‘Refreshes The Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach’, though, is unexpected. It gets your attention. In its day it stood out from all other beer advertising, and the phrase went into the language. I often say to people: ‘think carefully before deciding on a jokey strapline’. But there’s nothing wrong with a jokey strapline as long as a. it actually says something b. it’s truly witty and c. tonally, it suits your product or brand.

A jokey, throwaway line like Heineken’s wouldn’t have been right in my second example - Audi - however. A beer isn’t a major purchase; a car is. At the time, buying a German car wasn’t as common as it is now. However, everyone believed that German cars were well made and brilliantly engineered. The strapline they came up with was the inexpressibly dull ‘Progress Through Technology’. I can just see the humourless marketing director in Stuttgart telling the ad agency that this was the message he wanted to get across. The creative leap the agency made was to use this line in the UK in German: ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik … as they say in Germany’, read by the very English, very dry Geoffrey Palmer. It said ‘brilliantly engineered German quality’, and still managed to perform the time-honoured tradition here in Britain of sniggering at Germans.

My third and final example is this: when I was at Saatchi & Saatchi someone came up with ‘The World’s Favourite Airline’ for British Airways. I think we’d all agree that this is a successful strapline. What you’ll notice about it is it isn’t a rhyme; nor is there a joke in it. Instead, it’s a claim that at the time was so bold, it made people completely reassess the company. ‘We’re not the biggest airline in little ol’ Britain any more’, it seemed to say, ‘because now we’re the biggest airline on the planet’. ‘The World’s Favourite Airline’. Those four little words told the world that BA was a global brand. And the world's uber-airline.

To be honest, the strapline has rather gone out of fashion with modern brands. The coolest brands: Apple, Virgin, Pret a Manger, Innocent, all find other ways to get their brand messages and tonality across. They don’t do that by what they say so much as how they behave. That doesn’t mean to say you should do the same – after all, most small businesses aren't as well known as they are. But if you do choose to have a conventional strapline for your business, do ask yourself some important questions first: what is the most important thought I need to leave people with? Is the tone of voice right for my business? And is there a better way of getting my brand across than via a strapline?

In other words, do I really, really need one? If you say 'yes' to that, make sure it's a cracker.