Slogan: If you can’t beat ‘em, Fool ‘em!

Does your company have a slogan?

Some people call them taglines. I prefer slogan. It’s got that old-school, Mad Men feel. Slogans are meant to be spoken and repeated. Taglines are just tagging along.

A good slogan should complement your company’s name, not just repeat it. If the company name is something straight like “Yard Sprinkler Installers of Inglewood,” your slogan should not be “We install sprinklers.” Try something weird, like “Water, water every where.” (Though that one may only appeal to Coleridge scholars).

On the other hand, if your name is something weird like FlubbyZubbies, you might need a straight slogan to explain what you do: “The Finest Kids Socks on the Planet!”

When we went looking for a slogan to compliment our silly name, we considered a few. The name BookFool.com is a little weird, but it does have Book in there, which is basically what we do. It’s a somewhat-weird-but-still-basically-straight name.

Our past slogan was “Laughing in the face of high book prices,” which we used for a while in our used book descriptions. I still think this one has potential. It plays on the Fool aspect and gives a bit of our value proposition: Low book prices.

When we realized that BookFool.com was going to expand beyond selling cheap books, though, we wanted to expand our slogan’s horizons without killing the original spirit. We wanted something that embodied our subversive spirit and showed that we’re creating a new way to buy/sell your used books.

This phrase “If you can’t beat ‘em, Fool ‘em” has been floating around in our internal wiki for months. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t a home run with everyone at first, but it’s been growing on us. We think it indicates our unique stance toward business: Sometimes the best way to beat a competitor is to do something so totally Foolish as to confound them.

We’re still trying to decide which slogan is right for us. We’ll probably try out many over the years.

What’s your slogan?