I ran across John Quelch's post on corporate branding today, and it's mostly a fine set of principles - but I think it's easy to over extend his argument. Here's one of his principles:

Efforts are focused on a single, global corporate brand rather than individual product brands.

This works great for large companies (IBM, GE), where the product really is less relevant than the company sellingit, in most respects. The whole "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" thing helps a lot, and extends to most other large entities. At the smaller scale though? If your product identity evaporates behind a corporate facade, you may as well not exist.

What you really want is a noticeable product brand that slots into the corporate branding cleanly and naturally.

Like, say, Cincom Smalltalk :) Corporate Branding and Product Branding simply should not be seen as opposing forces.

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