When Choosing Between Two Brands, Why Keep The Less Popular One?
from the go-figure dept
The real clincher for AT&T's buyout of BellSouth was its desire to control Cingular, their wireless joint venture. Cingular, you might remember, bought AT&T Wireless back in 2004, and spent a good chunk of change on rebranding efforts to make consumers aware of the change. Given that, it was a little curious to see the news that AT&T plans to quickly phase out the Cingular brand as it seeks to unite all its units, services and products under the AT&T name. But it wasn't just the money that made it strange, it's also the fact that the Cingular brand represents something very different than the staid, old (albeit well-known) AT&T one. Cingular's brand is all about wireless, and represents something much more forward-looking than the old fixed-line mentality AT&T evokes. However, a marketing research firm has added a little more fuel to the fire with a report saying the Cingular brand is much more popular than the AT&T one. Granted, its metrics sound a bit fuzzy, but it reports that AT&T is the least talked about telecom brand, and when it is mentioned, fewer of those mentions are positive than any other telecom brand in the US as well. Things get even stranger when you consider how AT&T said that AT&T Wireless had broken its brand by offering such poor customer service and gaining such a bad reputation. It's hardly clear why AT&T thinks it's got more to gain by consolidating everything under its less popular brand name. While the AT&T brand may have a lot of recognition, the thoughts that follow aren't necessarily good ones.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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AT&T brand
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AT&T still the same
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ATTMOBILE.COM seems awefully similar to
TMOBILE.COM
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ATT+T-Mobile Merger?
I'll keep my Verizon, thank-you-very-much.
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ATT Mobile was going to be the name for awhile
The AT&T brand is a much better brand than Cingular. Believe me, AT&T did their own market research before making a decision like this. Not a chance this wasn't analyzed to death. A strong unified brands is much better than trying to maintain 2 or 3 brands. And I'm sure they spent a lot more money on their research than whoever funded this report did.
The fact is, almost everyone who is ever going to own a cell phone has one. The carriers are looking to score large corporate accounts now. AT&T plays better in the boardroom.
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multiple brands
Untrue. Or, at least, not necessarily true. Diversification of brands has an insulating quality. If or when one brand does something that generates backlash, you as a parent company continue to float comfortably on the strength of your other brands. See Gap/Old Navy, Pizza Hut/KFC/Taco Bell/PepsiCo, Ford/Lincoln/Mercury/Mazda, Dodge/Chrystler/Jeep/Mitsubishi, Honda/Acura, Nissan/Lexus, Chevy/Cadillac/Hummer/Pontiac/GMC... I could go on. The point is, multiple brands are not automatically a burden, and quite often are a benefit.
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Never kill a brand
I can't think of an example that will mean much to Americans. But in Britain we had a chain of supermarkets called "Fine Fare". Back in the 1970's there was a FineFare in every town, they were the Tesco of their day. But in just a few years after they were bought out by Gateway the brand dissappeared. It exists only in the minds of old farts like me now.
But here's the thing that the current owners probably don't realise. If I were to walk into a street with an ASDA (Wallmart) and I saw a FineFare shop I would choose to go there in an instant. Those memories from the 1970s are as strong as ever, the brand is still synonymous with "good value" in my supermarket schema.
Destroying a brand is simply destroying potential wealth. AT&T are extremely foolish to do so. I have no idea what Americans think of Cingular, but I can tell you what Americans think of AT&T - a company that snoops on their private conversations and actively sells their private information to sinister government agencies. Or, as saw it said on Slashdot once, "AT&T, the only company whos logo is the Death Star".
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Re:
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AT&T sucks
A.
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AT&T is a strong brand
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att vs cingular
that is the question.
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Unified services
Unifying the brand might be worthwhile if they are also unifying the actual service offerings.
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Sorry at&t
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Never Again
Then with Cingular, the service go so bad, I could never connect, my calls were constantly dropped( still charged for them), even had an instance where I tried to dial 911 over a dozen times and could not connect because the "network" was "busy"....
Needless to say, I have T-mobile now.....
I hae a Cingular phone from my work, and there has been no improvement. I just pick up my T-mobile phone when I need to make a call.
What's worse, is that I Had Bellsouth for the home phone and DSL internet, can't wait to see what happens now.... I might go back to dial up becuase the cable companies here are even worse than At&t ever thought about being....
Now that is bad.
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This wasn't for us.
"A World Connected" can't be if at&t isn't in the wireless market. (this is your quing youtube videos from your home internet connection to view on your cellular phone so that you can text them to your favorite buddies so that they can email their friends... etc).
If I were them I'd want to keep the cingular brand as an imprint of at&t because of its equity and perceived value amongst consumers.
Cingular powered by at&t.
which would be abbreviated to Cingular ATT.
This way you can keep Cingular as well as at&t.
the drawback of course is that the brand is instantly less portable as a result...
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yada yada
It never ceases to amaze me at the stupiidity of corporate decision makers.
Was I surprised when the word of the Cingular phase-out came down? No.
My first thought (being from the lowly SOUTH) was that it would be hard for AT&T Wireless to keep sponsoring NASCAR team in the NEXTEL Cup series, as the Cingular sponsorship was grandfathered into being allowed to stay with a team when Nextel took over, but NEW wireless sponsors are NOT accepted.... I wonder if that will make anybody mad??
Surely I have BETTER things to do today :-)
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more yada
Didn't the FCC break UP the Bell / AT&T relationships not TOO long ago?? I have yet to see a decent story explaining WHY they are allowing the "baby" Bells to again hookup with their loing-lost MOTHER...
Well, the MONOPOLY game comes with credit/debit cards now, so I guess ANYthing can happen.
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How about the $$$ wasted on re-branding?
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networking
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