Case Study: Developing a Product Tagline as a Marketing Tool

For a startup company developing the next generation in digital lighting, we used an exercise that resulted in creating a tagline to market the new product

The exercise is called the Six Sentence Exercise, and it works by turning perceived limitations into strengths.

Basically, the participants, in this case the principals of the company, were asked to write six sentences. Three sentences had to be about the product and believed to be true. For example, one participant wrote: “Our lights shine like none other in the world.” The second group of three sentences had to about themselves or their job descriptions, and they had to be untrue but written as if they were true. For example, a participant wrote: “My desk has wings and I fly all over the country looking for financing.” When they had completed their six sentences, they were then asked to look for “disjunctive connections”—word combinations that don’t normally go together—and use these combinations to construct three or more new sentences. The results were then written on a white board, and collectively rearranged until new patterns began to emerge.

From this process, which took less than half-an-hour, a product tagline was developed: “We bring imagination to light.”