Bad Branding Moves: AT&T to Dead Cingular

When I first saw the news that AT&T was dropping the Cingular brand and replacing it with AT&T Wireless, I had difficulty believing it. However, Jaffe was more disturbed than I:
The cover story of this week's Ad Age documents (in my opinion) inarguably the dumbest moment in branding history...and a continuation of the worst branding moves ever made by one of the worst companies to date . . . Cingular is one of the branding success stories of our time (right up there with the Targets of the world) and how a monolithic, staid, lethargic and bureaucratic company like AT&T could ignore Cingular's swooping courting of a younger and more progressive consumer base, is beyond me.

Advertising Age: AT&T Plans to Kill Cingular Brand
Karl Barnhart, managing director, CoreBrand, New York, a former AT&T agency, agreed that changing the Cingular name "doesn't make sense." Cingular's brand is "relevant for the younger audience; it's a fun, hip, interesting, dynamic -- everything you don't think about AT&T."

Mr. Barnhart estimates the changeover will cost "probably one-half billion per year for three to five years." And in the end, consumers still may not understand why they moved from writing a monthly check to AT&T to writing one to Cingular and then going back to AT&T, he said.

Comments

[sonnyredd]

Disagree. The AT&T brand, and the 'death star' are more attractive to business concerns who make up the bulk of cingular's customers. Further, it unites the former SBC with the now SBC owned Cingular, great strategy.

The worst thing in the world was Verizon changing from Bell Atlantic.

I like the 'throwback' names, and it is nice to see the Grand Dame of telecom back in the saddle once more.

[Spirit Barlow]

Being a former AT&T employee, all I can say is once again Big Mama done slip and bumped her head."HARD" progressive thinking in a former world leader who seems more bent on just trying to survive than be a force in industry anymore is not going to happen.
When Big Mama recovers from her fall and she will, has she thought about all of her children who might just abandon her.
Oh yeah, I'm also a cingular customer.