Cingular/AT&T Flip-Flop-- by Nate Winter

It's official. Cingular is changing it's name to AT&T and I, for one have had it with this revolving door of branding and ownership.

Stephen Colbert from Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" has an especially entertaining recount of AT&T's identity over the past two decades. See image at left. [The clip has been removed from YouTube and is nowhere to be found online. If a version surfaces, I'll post a link.]

It was GOOD for AT&T to become Cingular because AT&T is a brand that stands for land-line telephone service. Cellular phone service, representing a completely new category, deserves its own brand: Cingular. AT&T/Cingular spent something like $1 Billion to establish the Cingular brand (which I believe is the strongest brand in cellular service).

And now I have the feeling that's all being undone because some corner office jackass with an ego problem wants everything to be AT&T so he can feel like a big shot. It's similar to what happened here in Chicago with Federated Department Stores changing our beloved and historic Marshall Field's stores to Macy's. They trashed the established Marshall Field's brand, made it Macy's and people are furious. I don't expect people to get so upset about Cingular's transition back to AT&T, but you never know. A cell phone is a very personal thing. But is the service?

The root of the problem is that the whole thing smacks of disorganization. It doesn't take a branding expert to see that no organized company would spend $1 billion dollars to create the strongest wireless brand and then trash it to adopt the name of the smaller competitor it bought up and dissolved a couple years ago. Most people didn't blink when Cingular bought up AT&T Wireless, it made sense that the strong wireless brand would consume the weaker one. The public viewed the dissolution of AT&T Wireless at the hands of Cingular as a bold statement of Cingular's brand superiority. And why shouldn't they? And now these same customers are being asked to accept this weak brand over the strong one just a few years later.

I doesn't add up. Certainly not to $70 per month. As a Cingular customer it makes me wonder how much of my $70 monthly cell phone bill goes to nonsensical wheel reinvention. How much money could I save if they just kept the name "Cingular" and didn't spend another $1 billion to change to AT&T?

I don't expect there to be protesting in the streets like there was against Macy's in Chicago, but I expect some sort of reaction to occur. I'm not sure if existing Cingular/AT&T Wireless customers will defect to Verizon or smaller competitors or it will dissuade would-be converters from switching. Or maybe something completely different altogether.

It's probably my bitterness, but this Cingular customer would like to see the branding flip-floppers in the high ranks sweat for this blooper. The lesson of brand consistency needs to be learned again.

-- Nate Winter