What’s your (tag)line?

Let’s say you’re an ad exec making a commercial. You’ve been tasked with coming up with a great tagline (and maybe a slogan) for a product. What would it be?

Or, to get to the point of this article — I mentioned earlier about marketing yourself. What would your tagline be?

For me, personally, it’s taken many years, but I think I’ve finally figured mine out: “My job is to make other people’s jobs easier.”

Let’s back up a bit. How did we get here?

There have been many great taglines in the history of advertising. Whenever you hear one of these, a specific product immediately comes to mind.

• Think Different
• Just Do It
• Got Milk?
• America Runs On Dunkin’

Each of these taglines immediately invokes the product they represent: Apple, Nike, California Milk Processor Board (and eventually, the entire dairy industry), and Dunkin’ Donuts.

Through my past several months of job hunting, it occurred to me that my career could best be summed up by what I did at one of my previous jobs. When I worked for a server infrastructure department, my job was to provide information to the server team in order for them to efficiently do their jobs. The department was a support team. My job was to support the support team.

It occurred to me that that was a good summary of my career, and a description of what I do best. I’m passionate about supplying my coworkers with whatever accurate information they need to do what they need to do, usually through documentation (although I use other means as well — it’s good to have database experience). This has created a mindset, as well as a degree of assertiveness, whenever I go into interviews.

So, my tagline is, “My job is to make other people’s jobs easier.”

What’s yours?

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