Know-How Exchange : Branding

It depends on what you're trying to accomplish with the logo and name. If you simply want a name to identify the business, the sub-brand approach will probably be fine.

If, on the other hand, you want the logo to communicate your positioning, you will probably need a different brand name for each product/division.

A brand (and the logo that represents it) is a promise -- a promise to deliver certain benefits every time. If you promise different benefits for different products -- especially to the same target audience -- you'll confuse them by using the same name for every brand/product.

That's why most sophisticated consumer packaged goods companies (like Procter & Gamble, for example) have different brand names for different products in the same category -- Tide, Bold, Gain, Era, Oxydol, Cheer, etc. -- all manufactured by the same company in the laundry detergent category. They could have named each product Tide, with a modification that spelled out the unique benefit of each one ... but that would have really confused people who thought they knew what Tide stood for.

There's a good lesson there. If you don't have the budget that P&G has, you need your brand name to work as hard for you as it can. The better job you do of making the brand stand for a specific benefit, the more you need to have a different brand for each benefit/product/category. If you do a lousy job, then there's nothing wrong with using one brand name for everything.