Powerlines: Words That Sell Brands, Grip Fans, and Sometimes Change History | 
| Author: Steve Cone
Publisher: Bloomberg Press
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 298975
Format: Illustrated
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 1576603040
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.802
EAN: 9781576603048
Publication Date: April 24, 2008
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Product Description
Powerlines, the exceptional slogans that people remember long after the campaign ends, stand out from the barrage of marketing messages consumers face each day. A product, service, company, candidate, or an organization with a powerline outshines the competition every time.
Steve Cone, author of 'Steal These Ideas!,' reveals the secrets to contemporary marketing's biggest mystery: how to conjure the phrase that will make a product irresistable and memorable. This book restores the lost art of creating killer slogans to its proper place: front and center in every campaign.
Drawing on examples of great and not-so-great lines from marketing, politics, and popular culture, Cone provides an irreverant, intelligent, and insightful primer on a singularly important aspect of brand building.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 You absolutely, positively need to get this book overnight. September 14, 2008
Powerlines are what can prop up the troops and kick up consumer sales for decades. You know - like Snap, Crackle Pop, or You Deserve a Break Today. It comes down to some theory, art, and they way we humans have evolved to remember sounds or melodies (jingles) that quickly evoke (marketers hope) a thought about a product - and then hopefully buying it. There is a difference between "Say Pepsi Please" and "Can I please have a Pepsi". Backed with sufficient advertising support, one will grow to be a valuable asset and the other a bomb. Steve Cone puts some method to the madness - or what before was recognized but not described so ably. The next time you need a great line to support your product or brand, you will have the guidelines to produce it. Also interesting were some historical powerlines that have their origins hundreds of years ago. Cone leaves us with more than today's, well, corporately correct and boring, ineffective lines.
 I'm really not convinced September 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The second half of "Powerlines" is a decent marketing primer on taglines -- how to recognize good ones and how to create them yourself. It's useful information for advertisers and marketers to know. But Steve Cone is trying to make the tagline into something much more: a "powerline" that achieves the great things described in his subtitle. I don't think his analysis and his examples support his claims.
Cone writes "Most companies that have been marketing leaders over long periods of time employed taglines that built their brand promise into a powerful motivator for consumers to react to and purchase their product" (p. 198).
But have they? In the many examples the author gives of powerful branding taglines, he never proves the tagline was an essential element in making the sale. As the number-crunchers say, he doesn't isolate the variable. Is the "ultimate driving machine" tagline really "a major contributor to BMW's success" (p. 188)? Or is it a crystallization of a host of things -- engineering, luxury, reputation -- that have made BMW a powerful brand? After all, Toyota is the world's leader in car sales and number two in the United States, but do they have a decades-old "powerline" driving their sales? It may be a chicken-or-egg question, but that's just my point.
Perhaps the clearest example of the author's failure to link "powerline" with sales is his mention, several times, of Ed McMahon's "Heeeere's Johnny!" call at the start of Johnny Carson's "The Tonight Show." Yes, it was memorable and distinctive, but was it "influential"? Only if Cone is suggesting people tuned into the program, not for the guests or the music or the comedy or Johnny himself, but to hear Ed's invocation.
I guess what my hesitation comes down to is whether "being memorable" is enough. Certainly it's nice. But as a marketer, I'm not being paid to create memories. I'm being paid to drive sales.
I said above that the second half of this book is a good marketing primer. The first half is mostly the author's discussion of memorable "powerlines" from politics and the media. Unfortunately, his explanation or analysis of these were surprisingly often flawed. (Some of these examples may be nitpicky -- but enough nits gathered in one place suggest a serious health issue.)
For example, Cone starts (pp. 8-11) by telling the stories behind some famous nursery rhymes. But much of what he tells as straightforward fact is actually theory and can't be proven. Others, like "Three Blind Mice" being about Queen Mary I or "Ring Around the Rosy" being about the plague, are urban myths debunked on well-known reference sites like snopes-dot-com. In the section on political slogans, he cites "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage" as a Hoover campaign slogan in 1928 (p. 57). In fact, as political-writer and word-maven William Safire notes in his essential Safire's New Political Dictionary, the phrase (usually given as "two cars in every garage" or "a car in every back yard") was most closely associated with Democrat Al Smith, who used it as an attack on the incumbent GOP.
Finally, a trifecta in his discussion of Theodore Roosevelt (pp. 49-50), who did not order the navy to paint its ships white (USN battleship hulls were white well before the Spanish-American War, as contemporary photographs show); he did not coin the "powerline" "White Water Navy" (the "popular way to describe naval power" is *blue*-water navy); and he did not coin the phrase "The Square Deal" "during his second term" to describe a program including "the establishment of the National Park System" (again Safire, who shows TR first used the phrase in 1901 -- that is, in his first term -- and that "the Square Deal" always referred to trust-busting and other regulation of Big Business, not to things like the park system).
In a way, all this reinforces the question I asked above: is it enough to be memorable? As Cone writes about some great movie taglines, "These lines have struck a chord with our social conscience and live on and on -- the true test of any powerline" (p. 104).
But is that marketing?
Sales techniques from the pros. July 20, 2008
This book has several outstanding ideas that really work. They come from one of the best in the business who has put these techniques to work and they are tried and true. You can't mess with success. The delivery was prompt as well, so the vendor did a great job and it was in nice condition.
Thank you,
Claudine Trainor
 Persuasion History July 5, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Anyone interested in persuasion needs to have some historical context and Cone gives it to us. Recall Nixon's ill fated tagline for his 1960 campaign? "For the Future" Talk about uninspiring. As Cone says the only thing worse would be 'For the Past." Revisit the pain of companies that gave up great taglines just to change. Look at GE who abandoned the meanigful and memorable, "We Bring Good Things to Life" with the anemic and pointless "Imagination at Work." Great section on states that spend good money for poor taglines for travel. Illinois:'Right here. Right now." That's a howler. Good(but short) end section on how to create a powerline and some advice on developing the powerline and building your marketing and company around it. That's true: give people a great story to believe in (and a story can be a one liner) and their conduct follows. A book persuasion pros need in their library.
Want to be a more effective marketer? Read this book... May 2, 2008
14 out of 14 found this review helpful
Powerlines is both a quick study on how to create more effective slogans and taglines - the heart of any successful marketing campaign - and a thoughtful primer on how the right words can deliver the brand promise to today's consumers. The book is filled with real life examples of how well-chosen words can turn an ordinary product into an extradordinary brand. Powerlines is a marketing professional's canon on how words sell brands, but fans of politics and social history will also find this an entertaining read.
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