This morning the Washington Post had this piece on the low-key nature of the AT&T Wireless – Cingular merger. While the piece was a relatively fluffy one (as one comes to expect from the business section of the Post) it did touch on the very interesting issue of branding for the soon-to-be-former AT&T Wireless and their former corporate parent AT&T.
A lot has been going on with these two companies in the last six months or so. AT&T is effectively on the auction block being ready to be bought by Bell South or some other poor bastard, announcing a withdrawal from the consumer market while at the same time putting on an advertising blitz during the Olympics built largely around their consumer VoIP service. And if that, in and of itself were not confusing enough…
AT&T Wireless, which is a completely separate company from AT&T, mind you, had their own advertising blitz during the Olympics. One will recall the “How many bars?” ad with swimmer Michael Phelps. That ad push came on the back of months and months of bad coverage in the press that AT&T claim actually hurt their reputation for having licensed the AT&T Wireless brand to the company AT&T Wireless. Should I just start referring to these companies by their stock ticker symbols (T and AWE) to cut down on the confusion?
It seems Cingular are going to take a slow migration plan with the brand. I actually think this is a mistake. Considering the troubles AT&T Wireless have had I really think this branding exercise should be done like removing a Band-Aid: tear it right off. Cingular should bring in the blokes from Cisco who re-brand the companies their acquire and just completely redo the AT&T Wireless retail locations. They should make a big push to the current AT&T Wireless customers and get all of the service contract plans and features they can into their hands immediately (like roll-over minutes). The new company should use this as an opportunity to tell customers the problems of the past are behind them and engage in some top-notch systems consolidation exercises to truly deliver on that promise.
