Most businesses don't need a tagline yet.

It usually happens at the logo stage. The designer sends three options and asks, reasonably, what goes underneath. Nobody has an answer, so the founder posts a request in the family WhatsApp group, and by dinner there are eleven suggestions and a vote. The winner is something like “Quality you can trust”, which could sit under any business in the country, and now it is printed on the visiting cards.

So, do you need a tagline? Often the honest answer is: not yet.

What a tagline is for

A tagline travels with your name to places where there is no room for anything else: a hoarding, a carry bag, the last three seconds of an ad, the side of a delivery box. It works by repetition. The line and the name are seen together so many times that one starts to carry the other.

That is why the famous ones feel effortless. Amul's “Utterly Butterly Delicious” works partly because it is a good line and partly because the country has been reading it beside the Amul girl for decades. Asian Paints' “Har ghar kuch kehta hai” means something because years of ads have shown us what it means. A tagline borrows its meaning from everything said around it.

A new business has not said anything around it yet. So the tagline has to do all the work alone, in four words, and it usually cannot.

When you can skip it

Think about where your customers actually meet you. For most small businesses in India that is a referral, a Google listing, an Instagram profile, a WhatsApp chat or the homepage. In every one of those places there is room for a full sentence, and a full sentence does more.

Compare two lines under a clinic's name. “Smiles, redefined.” Or: “Dental clinic in Navrangpura, open till 9 on weekdays.” The first sounds like branding. The second gets the appointment, because it answers the two questions a patient with toothache has: is this a dentist, and can I go after work.

That second line is a descriptor, and most businesses need one long before they need a tagline. It is also very close to what your homepage headline should be doing: saying what you do, for whom, plainly enough that a stranger gets it in one read.

Write the long version first

Every tagline is a short version of something. If the long version does not exist, the short version is a guess.

So start with a sentence, not a slogan. What do you do, who is it for, and why would someone pick you over the shop down the road? Write it in plain words, as you would say it to a cousin at a wedding. If you cannot get it into one sentence, that is the work to do first, and no tagline will hide it. If you can, you may find the sentence is useful enough that the tagline can wait.

A tagline is a short version of something. Write the long version first.

When you do need one

There are real reasons to write a tagline, and they are mostly about space and repetition:

• You advertise where there is no room. Hoardings, packaging, radio and video ads all end on the name, and a line beside it is the only thing that gets said.
• You have several products under one name. A tagline can say what ties them together when no single product can.
• You intend to repeat it for years. A tagline changed every Diwali never gets the repetition that makes it work.

If none of these is true of your business this year, put the money and the time into the website and the descriptor instead. Taglines are one of the things on our services page under advertising, and that is where they belong: next to the ads they finish.

What a good one does

When you do write one, test it against a short list:

• Could a competitor use it unchanged? If the jeweller across the road could print it tomorrow, it says nothing about you.
• Does it sound like you? A tagline is the most concentrated dose of your brand voice you will ever write. A playful brand with a solemn tagline sounds like it borrowed someone's suit.
• Can your staff say it aloud without wincing? If the person at the counter would be embarrassed to repeat it, customers will be embarrassed to hear it.
• Is it free of the usual words? Taglines are where the overused words gather, because a short line feels like it needs a big word. It usually needs a small, precise one.

There is a tagline machine on our homepage that spins three random phrases into a line. It is a joke, and the lines it produces sound uncomfortably like real ones. If yours could have come out of a machine like that, it is not finished.

A cheaper way to find one

Here is an approach that costs nothing. Write the plain sentence, use it everywhere for six months, and listen. Customers will describe you back to their friends in their own words, and one phrase will keep turning up in reviews, in WhatsApp forwards, in the way people introduce you. That phrase has already been tested on real people. It is often a better tagline than anything a room of people will invent in an afternoon.

So this week, skip the tagline. Write the one sentence that says what you do and who it is for, and put it under your name on the website and the Instagram bio. The tagline can come later, once there is something for it to shorten.