Many companies, however, do not have a large enough budget to hire an advertising agency. If you belong to one of these small budget businesses, do not despair. With some creativity and persistence, you can develop your own tag line.

** First, decide what you want to communicate with your tag line.

* If you have a positioning statement and/or unique selling proposition, write them down. Your tag line should reinforce them.

* Ask yourself these questions.

- Who are your customers? - What benefits do you give your customers? - What feelings do you want to evoke in your customers? - What action are you trying to generate from your customers? - How are you different from your competition?

Try to get one or more of these across in your tag.

** Second, prepare to brainstorm.

* Gather tag lines from other companies and brands. Look in other categories besides your own and try to find tag lines from both large and small companies.

As you find tag lines, write them on index cards or individual slips of paper. You will be mixing and matching them and pairing them with unrelated items as you brainstorm.

Pay attention to words used, how they are put together, and which of above questions they address. By doing this, you are more likely to come up with a unique angle for your own tag line.

NOTE: You are looking at others' tag lines only to spark ideas. Do not plagiarize. You must come up with your own, original tag line.

To find tag lines, look around. You may find them anywhere there are advertisements, packaging, or logos. Look in cupboards, around desks, in magazines, on TV/radio commercials, in print advertisements, and on Web sites.

To get you started, here are some tag lines I found in only a few minutes:

Gather background information about your giant, find information many times publicly available (press releases, industry reports) and that you can map to information in your own company.

Brainstorm twenty ideas on how this giant could improve its business, be brutal, except no limitations and write down every idea.

Using a significantly larger business provides numbers that will highlight small improvements in big ways, look for ways that improve value of each customer for that business.

Take your top three ideas and substitute your numbers, observe how numbers you used from giant relate to yours, especially look at ratios of income to profits.

Prioritize these ideas (with your numbers) according to their value in accomplishing your business goals, this is last thinking step.