The practice of keeping a multitude of individual brands, as well as sticking to company brand to identify products of diverse range of categories, have long defined branding strategies in marketing history. Each comes with its own advantages and drawbacks, spurred primarily by nature of business, social and economic environment, and consumer perceptions. So here's a list of imperatives you can reflect on when choosing and developing proper branding strategies for your business. Though I refer to Internet at a few lines, they are not exclusively applicable to Internet branding, but to branding in general marketing context.

Availability of resources

Managing multiple brands naturally spawns demand for more financial, human, and technical resources. Effective use of Internet for branding and customer-relationship purposes connotes competent technical, management, and marketing team at back end, buttressed by sufficient available funds. From early stage of planning and development to regular maintenance and periodical improvements, combination of human, technical, and financial capital are building blocks of successful Internet marketing programs.

At very least, you need one site for each brand with its own individual domain and brand characters, maintained by exclusive teams of developers, editors, designers, and marketers. Some might suggest merging all brands under one major site and divide them into a series of smaller ones under sub domains, all of which are managed by one single team. But this approach would dilute real identity of each brand as well as weigh down productivity and performance of supporting team.

A case in point is AOLTimeWarner, whose plethora of brands spans across Time, Fortune, Business2, People, Money magazines, America Online, Warner Music, and CNN, to name some. Recognized by its independent identity and target audience, each brand maintains an online territory of its own that conveys individual character, spawned by design, content, and domain name. There is a very little - if any - feel of and reference to AOLTimeWarner as parent brand.

Credibility of corporate brand

So what makes a "good" logo? Most people would answer "I just know it when I see it!" and this isn't so far from truth. A good logo catches eye - it makes observer curious or engaged, if only for a short moment… a moment in which an image and existence of your company is embedded in mind rather than filtered out with a million other daily stimuli. But even if a good logo 'just is', there are elements for making it happen … and we will look at some of those. I will also discuss some of issues designing logos which work in two distinct worlds - print and online.

There are three basic types of logos, which can be used alone or combined within one design:

illustrative logos (a logo which clearly illustrates what your company does), graphic logos (a logo that includes a graphic, often an abstraction, of what your company does), and font-based logos (a text treatment which represents your company) Creating a logo is always a process - though different designers have their own methods. Many designers will begin by sketching thumbnails or playing with shapes on computer screen, until something "clicks" and they follow that path to see where it leads. One way to start is to select a shape which represents concept of company, and begin playing with it. The idea is to come up with something interesting or clever, whether a viewpoint which is different, or an unusual combination of shapes. Perhaps it will be something which will require some guesswork on part of viewer, but then be crystal clear when they look at it another way.

Many designers prefer to developing logos beginning with, or consisting entirely of text. By experimenting with fonts, size, shapes they seek to find an interesting way to represent company using form of letters. Again, simplicity is extremely important - this is not time to use fancy decorative fonts. Whether alone or combined with graphic elements, text in a logo must be easily readable at small sizes