Beginner to winner - part 3

The first part is usually a task, and can take the form of factual questions, multiple choice questions, anagrams, how many words can you make from the product name or prize, word searches, crosswords, spot the differences, identifying places, buildings or people, photography, inventing recipes, or even putting features into order of merit.

The second part of the competition is normally the tiebreaker. Whilst captions, estimations, and other tasks are used, more often than not the tiebreaker will be a sentence completion. Compers refer to these as 'slogan comps’, for example:

'I want to win a holiday with promoter’s wine because... 'I w-h-ine for a 'grape’ escape.'

You may be one of thousands of people who never enter slogan competitions, either because you think only other people win or because you haven’t yet learn how to write a winning slogan.

There’s a knack to writing successful slogans and a skill you can learn.

It’s all down to word play. Fit’s my New Year Resolution, won me a £1,500 health resort break, whilst Golden opera-tune-ity  scooped a £2,000 music system.

"It’s a fluke", said my friends, when car number one came along. Ten words for a Ford Fiesta!

'Christmas goodies, exciting show, (supermarket’s) quality, I’m all aglow’.

"That’s not very good", said an honest friend.

What she didn’t know was it scored highly for aptness. For you see, I’d noticed that the store’s current advertising slogan was 'I’m glowing with supermarket’. A twist of their slogan, bring in the Christmas theme, add a dash of rhyme, and that was all the 'write' ingredients for a recipe for success. You can do this too.

Start on the prize-winning trail by writing down the lead-in line for your tiebreaker slogan, for example:

‘I buy my plants at this garden centre because...’

Then make a list of apt words, such as:

seeds, plants, dig, sow, water, hoe, tend, tree, branches, twigs

Underline those with double meanings which lend themselves to word play, for instance: sow, branch

Try to make words from other words, for example:

tremendous

tree-mendous

Next step is to build these words into phrases. You may want to say, 'I buy my plants at this garden centre because... they’re good, they offer tremendous value and I can buy them at any branch’

Sounds good but when you dig in a little word play, your slogan hopefully blossoms into a prize greenhouse, mower or garden makeover.

'I buy my plants at this garden centre because... 'they’re hoe sow good, offer tree-mendous value, at any branch’

Researching this fascinating subject, I uncovered over fifty styles of slogan writing, which not only scoop big competition prizes for you, but reap rewards in business too.

Clever captions or eye-catching headlines for your press releases, sales and promotional literature.

Writing competition slogans is great pun, sorry, great fun. I hope you’re 'twigging’ on!

© Copyright Lynne Suzanne www.win-with-lynne.co.uk