Free slogan generator for a stronger first draft.

Marne Street Cycles is a bike shop on a commuter route in a city, four staff, half the trade in repairs. The thing it does that its two nearest competitors do not is same day mechanical work with no appointment: bring it in before ten, ride it home that evening. The inputs given to the generator were the customer, people who cycle to work and cannot be without the bike, the difference, same day repairs without booking, and the feeling, dependable and unfussy.

The line the shop kept was: Back on the road by five. Six words, no subordinate clause, no company name inside it, and it now sits on the shutter, the van, the workshop docket and the footer of every email.

It holds up for four reasons. It passes the competitor test outright: a shop that books repairs a fortnight ahead cannot put its logo above that line without inviting complaints, so the sentence is genuinely owned. It is a promise the business can keep, because the workshop already sizes its Wednesday workload around it, and a slogan describing something operationally true survives the bad day instead of being contradicted by it. The rhythm is even, with the stresses falling on back, road and five, which is why it can be said down the phone as a sign off without sounding like an advert. And it is written from the customer's position: the subject of the sentence is the rider, not the shop.

One candidate was rejected late and it is worth saying why. Fixed today, ridden tomorrow scanned well and had a neat internal balance, but tomorrow quietly gives away the whole advantage. The shop's entire claim is that you do not lose an evening, and the line was busy conceding the evening for the sake of the rhyme. That is the most common way a good sounding slogan fails: the sound gets chosen first and the meaning bends to fit it.

The line the shop had used for six years before this was Your trusted local cycling experts. It is the version almost every business writes, and it is weaker in ways you can demonstrate rather than argue about. Put a competitor's name above it and nothing breaks, which means it distinguishes nothing. Three of its five words are self awarded: trusted, expert and, arguably, your. It has no verb doing any work, so it cannot be said aloud without sounding like signage. It describes the category the business is in, which the shop name and the window display already handle. And it makes a claim about character rather than about what happens to your bike, so a customer reads it and learns nothing they can act on. Back on the road by five tells them when to turn up.

Do not write a slogan before you can say what makes the business preferable, in plain words, without adjectives. A slogan is the compressed form of a position, and compressing something you have not worked out produces a pleasant sounding line that means nothing. If the honest answer to what makes you different is that you are much like the others but nicer, the work to do is on the offer, not on five words.

Skip it when the business name is already carrying the message. A name stating the service and the place leaves a slogan with very little left to say, and the result is usually a restatement that adds a line to every layout without adding meaning. In that situation a plain descriptor, what you do and where, sitting beside the logo, is more useful than a slogan and does not pretend to be one.

Hold off if the business is about to change shape. A slogan is a long term asset that gets its value from repetition, and repetition is exactly what you cannot commit to while the service mix, the audience or the ownership is under review. Six months of a line you then retire is worse than no line, because you have spent the novelty and taught people something you are about to contradict.

Be honest about repetition more generally. Slogans work by being seen many times in the same form, across signage, vehicles, packaging, email and everything else. If you have one channel and change your messaging every campaign, what you need is a good campaign line for this quarter, which is a different and much easier brief. And if there is any chance the line ends up on tooling, uniforms or a trademark application, take the shortlist through clearance advice before it goes into production rather than after.

A slogan is a typographic object before it is a piece of writing, and most of them are rejected in practice for reasons that never come up while drafting. It has to set on one line beside the logo at the size that lockup is actually used, which on a business card or a van door is small. It has to stay legible reversed out of a photograph, printed in one colour, embroidered on a polo shirt and reduced to the width of a phone screen. Long words with descenders and internal capitals behave badly at all of those sizes.

Before you commit, set the top three candidates in the real lockup and look at them at true scale rather than on a screen at two hundred percent. Then look at them as the last line of an email signature, on a compliment slip, and on the side of a vehicle at ten metres. Anything that has to break across two lines to be readable is either too long or the wrong shape, and a line that only works at hoarding size is not a slogan you can use every day.

The realistic test conditions are these. Someone glances at the back of a van in traffic, or hears a receptionist say the line at the end of a call, or reads it once at the bottom of an invoice. They are not comparing it against alternatives, they are not thinking about your brand, and they will not read it twice. That rules out wordplay needing a beat to land, puns that only work written down, and anything requiring knowledge of your industry.

So test in those conditions rather than in a meeting. Say each candidate to three people who do not work for you, and an hour later ask what they remember. Ask what they think the business does and whether the line made a promise. If they cannot repeat it, it is too long or the rhythm is wrong. If they can repeat it but cannot say what it promises, it is decorative. And watch for the line everybody in the room likes because they already know the context: internal approval is the least reliable signal available, since the room is the only audience that already understands you.

The positioning statement is internal. It is a paragraph, it names the audience, the alternative and the reason to prefer you, and it exists to settle arguments rather than to be read by customers. The descriptor is functional: it says what the company does and often where, it sits under the logo wherever the name alone would leave a stranger guessing, and it is deliberately plain. The slogan is the public compression of the positioning, and its job is the reason to prefer you.

Most weak slogans are one of the other two wearing the wrong clothes. A slogan that lists services is a descriptor. A slogan trying to include the audience, the difference and the values in one sentence is a positioning statement squeezed until it lost its verbs. Write all three separately, in that order, and the slogan gets easier, because you can stop asking it to carry information the descriptor is already handling three centimetres away.

Do not choose on the day you generate. Take the best three and use them for a fortnight in low stakes places: the email signature, an internal deck, the way you sign off a phone call, a handwritten note in a parcel. Lines that felt clever on the page start to grate by day four, and lines that felt plain often turn out to be the ones you reach for naturally. That fortnight is the cheapest test available and it catches most regrettable choices.

While you live with them, run the practical checks. Search each line as a phrase and see who is already using it, particularly in adjacent trades. Read it in the voice of an unhappy customer and see whether it becomes a stick to beat you with. Check it does not depend on a current price, a current offer or a temporary capability. Then get the survivor cleared for trademark purposes if it is going anywhere permanent. Once chosen, the discipline is to leave it alone: a slogan accrues value only by being repeated in exactly the same words for years.