New MSE tagline – Cutting your costs and fighting your corner
You’ll notice being rolled out across the site masthead today is a new slogan, ‘cutting your costs and fighting your corner’, which we think describes the site’s (horrid term coming) mission statement.
As we needed to shrink the "MoneySavingExpert.com" bit anyway as we’re running short of space for extra tabs, I thought it was time to enact a change that was sparked after I wrote the money mantras blog. In there I wrote about how the site had morphed and now had four distinct elements,
- Helping people improve their money and debt managment skills. Here with tools like the budget planner or places like debt-free wannabee board or articles like the credit card shuffle (how to cut debt costs without new credit) we aim to tackle the fundamentals.
- Cutting your bills without cutting back. This one’s quite straightforward, for the must-have house hold bills like car insurance or gas and electricity, how do you get the best possible deal?
- Deals and bargains. The site’s always looked at deals since it first launched, but since then the growth of online vouchers, codes and deals has been huge. It fits at the core of the MoneySaving philosophy I wrote about in my Money Diet book way back then. After all, MoneySaving is about having more and spending less, so showing people how to pay less for things they’d buy anyway is a core part.
- Fighting for financial justice. Not within the remit of the site when it started, it’s something that we started to add in about five years ago with consumer rights, bank charges, council tax rebanding and PPI reclaiming."
In the forum discussion on the back of this quite a few people commented that they didn’t feel the current slogan, ‘Consumer Revenge’, did that justice and wasn’t that appealing as it was too aggressive for some people, especially with things like the mental health and debt guide, which is far from ‘Revenge’.
When I first came up with the ‘consumer revenge’ slogan the site had a much more narrow remit, which was really explaining how to cut your bills without cutting back and spotting loopholes.
However, with the new breadth of deals, money management and the reclaiming, I had to agree I can see the point.
MoneySavingExpert.com OLD tagline
MoneySavingExpert.com New Feb 11 tagline
Coming up with the new tagline
To try and fit the whole of what the now massive site does in two words was virtually impossible. So we decide to get rid of the whole "Free, Free of Ads, UK, Consumer Revenge" and use all that space for the new slogan (don’t worry there are NO changes planned to change the way the site operates with regards to charging or ads, it’s purely a slogan change, the other bits are obvious.)
My first version was "cutting your bills, fighting your corner" but that missed out the deals element, so we decided to change it to ‘costs’.
There were two other options the team and I came up with, which we tested internally and on Facebook, "Cutting your costs and championing consumers" and the more stark "Bills, Deals, Financial Justice" which each phrase separated out under the masthead.
The overwhelming response is the slogan we’ve come up with is the winner – and I do think it gives a decent sense of all the elements. So from today it is going live. Hope you like it (I know some won’t, that’s always the way with change, but I think it’s a nice friendlier move forward).
