The Myth of Coherence in Multiple Brand Logos

Large companies create or acquire multiple brands to expand their businesses, and when the product range grows, create multiple brand logos to establish separate brand identities for each. Most branding experts are of the opinion that the logo of the umbrella company and all its sub-brands must maintain coherence in design to reflect the same core values. However, if you check the sub-brands of some large corporate houses, the story of branding may seem completely different.

For instance, companies like General Motors and Procter & Gamble have dozens of sub-brands but their logo designs don’t match the theme of the mother company’s insignia. On the contrary, it seems that GM and Procter & Gamble want to maintain a distance from their house of brands to give them enough space to grow and influence consumers’ psyche.

While branding gurus shout for maintaining coherence in multiple logo designs, there are a few problems. Let’s concentrate of GM to understand where the challenge lies. GM has a number of car trade names such as Opel, Cadillac and Buick, but all of them joined GM in different years. When a company keeps adding partners or buys another company, it’s impossible to match their logo with its own because you can’t predict the companies you may add in future and the target audience of those trademarks.

Diversity of product range can also cause trouble for traditional branding style. For instance, Procter & Gamble has brands like Ariel, Gillette, Dolce and Gabbana, Duracell and many more. As you can see, the products offered by these trademarks and their target audience are completely different. Experts say, in situations like these companies should at least use the same brand colors in different sub-brand insignias, but is it really possible? Procter and Gamble has a blue color emblem. Ariel and Gillette use the same color, but what about Duracell and Dolce and Gabbana? Both of them use black color heavily without any hint of blue.

Does the insignia of a mother concern really affect the popularity of its sub-concerns? How many people actually know that the Dolce and Gabbana is a sub-brand of P&G? And how many of its loyal customers will stop following Dolce and Gabbana because it is a part of P&G?

Companies can certainly maintain different corporate identities and reflect them through completely unique logo designs.