Every day I see a new subbrand come to life which makes me shake my head. These companies only focus is on the short term gain and not the long term brand issues. The law of subbrands says, if you want to launch a new product or service that does not fit your current brand then create a new separate brand.

We currently follow this rule for our own services that we run. Each company has it’s own branding and they are very different. As an example you will see our BlueFur site is much different from our InfernoDrive site and they both are very different from our dotUptime site. We could put all of our services as subbrands to BlueFur, like BlueFurUptime and BlueFurDrive but doing so would dilute our branding of BlueFur.

Another example which will really hit home for most is the mistake made by Cadillac in the late 90′s. When you think of a Cadillac a large, luxurious vehicle comes to mind. Cadillac created a subbrand called the Catera which is tiny in comparison to the full Cadillac. Can you imagine anyone going into the Cadillac dealership saying, “Hi I really like the idea of owning a Cadillac, I just wish you had one smaller.” With the Catera doing horrible the subbrand died in 2001.

Can you think of any subbrands that have failed or do not make sense to the main brand?