If got right, the tagline can be an effective and memorable device that is a true reflection of what your company does and your brand values. If got wrong, it could be the business world’s equivalent of an awful bar-side chat-up line.

While a number of great consumer taglines spring to mind, it seems to be more of a challenge to get it right in the B2B environment and so easy to go off message. Take for example the tagline for IPEX 2010 – the international print exhibition that happens every four years:

Perfect time. Perfect place. One unique opportunity.

This is just a bit too cryptic. It doesn’t tell us what the event is all about. There’s no mention of print or communications anywhere here. One unique opportunity starts to say something but if you didn’t know what IPEX is all about then the audience is left thinking, “One unique opportunity for what …?”

In the B2B world, marketers have the challenge of competing with their consumer counterparts whose brands and products naturally lend themselves to more catchy, funny, or even ‘sexy’ lines. The B2B remit however is more complex and tone will most likely remain businesslike. Yet there’s so much scope for effective tagline creation.

Working with a specialist agency who understands the B2B and vertical landscape is important. A good tagline that reflects your core value proposition and cutting edge principles can often be a perfect springboard for consistent messaging across all your content. And as we all know, “content is king”.

Since the ’90s, consumers have associated Marmite with the love it or hate it tagline thanks to their ever successful above the line advertising. Today, they have very cleverly extended it to everything they do, including their web presence and CSR activity by offering consumers free Horrid Henry audio books in association with Reading for Life when they buy their jars of Marmite.

This is a great example of how you can marry interesting and fresh content with existing strong brand messaging.  Keep up the good work, Marmite.  We’d welcome any ’samples’ you might want to send through to the Lindsell office … but perhaps not the Marmite flavoured washing powder.

Campaign magazine’s table of the biggest UK media agencies showed eight of the top 10 suffered a drop in billings between 2008 and 2009 – including a more than 10% slump by number one agency MediaCom, a 16.5 % fall by number four Mindshare and a 22.5% plunge by number six Starcom UK Group. The headlines also showed that WPP Group, which owns Mindshare, saw its profits fall by 16% in 2009.

But is there more to these figures than just the recession? We are now living in an age where companies are realising that they can rely less on traditional media vehicles such as newspapers, radio and even television and can instead speak more directly with their customers through digital media.

We already see print media owners struggling as newspapers and magazines grapple with ever-shrinking page counts and staff cuts. The long-term trend may be that the fragmenting TV marketplace, radio and other conventional media will be facing similar issues sooner rather than later.

Before the recent news on media agencies seeing their billings slump, we had a lot of talk in PR Week about Richard Sambrook, former head of global news at the BBC, jumping on the PR bandwagon to become “chief content officer” at a global PR agency to help clients create written, video and audio pieces.

This recognition that, in future, communicating with customers, stakeholders and the public at large will be about more than traditional PR – ie. placing articles in print publications or arranging broadcast interviews for clients – is nothing new to us here at Lindsell Marketing. Generating content that can fuel PR initiatives, marketing campaigns, websites, sales programmes and other ways of talking to the marketplace is a future that has already arrived here.

So while the recession may have accelerated the process, the change we see taking place in the way companies, government departments and other organisations communicate with the world around them is a permanent shift we have seen coming – and that includes PR as well as other traditional ways that companies communicate. The key going forward will be to develop the right content to fuel the new communication engines that are replacing traditional media vehicles.

Last year saw a turning point in its organisation. The organisers stepped up their game in terms of thought leadership, and this year are offering up to 80 sessions and keynotes from leading industry organisations like Google, Chartered Institute of Marketing and YouTube. This was also helped by the move in 2008 from the smaller Olympia venue to a larger presence at Earls Court. All this has transformed the show into a valuable industry leading event at a time when it would have been easy for the organisers to sit on their laurels being the only DM show around.

Thought leadership, analysis and industry insight has clearly become the focus, drawing in the visitors and exhibitors. And yet looking at the TFM press room, the exhibitor publicity is seriously lacking in effective thought leadership content.  The usual, mundane, “We’re going to be at TFM, this is what we do, please come and visit our stand” is the rule rather than the exception.  Snoozzz. Why not generate original research or publicise your client successes to help you stand out and draw interested punters in?

Luckily my colleague Hugh Filman will be visiting the show.  If you want advice on how to create an effective trade show PR strategy, that is more than a bland press release, flag him down – he’ll be more than happy to help!