"The strategy of integrating Cingular is not working"

We find antics like this kind of funny. At the annual Association of National Advertisers’ conference, there was a session about AT&T and its rebranding from Cingular. As it turns out, Cingular was the more favorably recognized brand. Go figure. This caused Kark Barnhart, managing director of Core Brand Communications, to opine that “They have not been able to transfer the positive equity from Cingular to AT&T, despite a massive marketing campaign. That’s a failure of epic proportions.” AT&T thinks that he’s missing the point.

Mr. Barnhart’s firm tracks 12,000 companies and studies consumers’ awareness of brands and how much they like them. The studies are combined into a metric called “Brand Power” and are used to ascertain how much of a given company’s stock share price can be attributed to brand. By Core Brand’s measures, AT&T has shown slight increases in familiarity and favorability, but they were within the study’s margin of error, meaning the results were basically flat.

The error, according to Core Brand Strategy, is that AT&T isn’t effectively connecting with consumers. Yes, they’re advertising like crazy, in every possible medium, but people don’t get the sense of what AT&T really is. Ah, but AT&T says that this is way off the point. They’re not just a wireless company, after all. They offer a wide range of telecommunications services, just as their rival Verizon does. So what, are they supposed to sell their broadband Internet as AT&T and their wireless products as Cingular? Wouldn’t people be confused? We suppose that provides an adequate explanation. Sure, they could have just called everything Cingular, but that would hurt at a global level. Cingular may be a popular brand in the U.S., but globally AT&T wins on that front. Still, it can’t be helping them in the U.S. People do recognize the AT&T brand, but some people have poor memories of the company, they of the phone leasing debacle. There are so many negative connotations that go along with AT&T that it really had us wondering at first why they didn’t just keep the popular Cingular brand. We suppose this provides an answer, but we’re not sure it was truly in the best interest of AT&T to go this route. [Advertising Age]]]>