AT&T Cooking Up New VoIP Product > Any info on why?

reply to MyDogHsFleas

Re: Any info on why?

rebranding is killing the established brand, especially when you aren't tweaking the brand but renaming it after old ma-bell.

who says at&t had a more positive branding than sbc? the reason they went to at&t was people were more aware of the name at&t over sbc. not it had a more positive view from the public. the public doesn't forget the old monopoly days. everyone does know who at&t is though.

in addition, the at&t wireless brand that was milked in its final months of all that was good (customer service, call quality, etc.) the at&t name was trashed for several months if not longer, while the corporate structure essentially sold out the consumers.

even if you disagree with the sbc comments, just look at how they took the cingular brand and threw a sack of crap on top of it, renaming it 'at&t wireless'.

Cingular wasn't renamed at&t wireless- the legal name of the wireless company was changed to "AT&T Mobility LLC", but the only brand they want you to use is at&t, without any descriptor- which probably works better in places like here where there's no landline at&t to deal with.

I always found it funny that Cingular bought the old AT&T Wireless (which DID use that name), spent tons of money to say "AT&T Wireless is now Cingular", and then very shortly after had to spend tons of money to say "Cingular is now 'the new' at&t".

By changing the legal name of the company it they did rebrand it. How? They do NOT use the name Cingular anymore except on their wireless network when you search for GSM carriers for signal. That's it. Everything else says ATT. cingular.com goes to wireless.att.com thats is a rebrand. Their commericals say ATT Wireless. NOT Cingular.

They rebranded the company weather you want to agree or not. Rebranding is when you change the name of a company and no longer use the old one in marketing or any other form.

reply to MyDogHsFleas
AT&T did NOT have a good name with people.. in the real world it wasn't well liked. It only had one thing going; it had name recognition. As a company, AT&T was was not consumer friendly.. they violated law after law... and they didn't do much innovating for years. They purchased a good cable conglomerate and gutted and fillet it and left those customers to rot.

I'm sorry to disagree with you but AT&T was a horrible company.. even outside BBR. (And I don't agree with BBR very often)

reply to EPS
Great time to plug the great Steven Colbert piece on AT&T...

That's friggin hilarious!

reply to fiberguy

reply to hottboiinnc
No commercials say "at&t Wireless", they just say "at&t". That was my point

reply to morbo
Just remember it's the SBC executives at the helm of the new AT&T. SBC only purchased AT&T for the nationwide name recognition and the nationwide network backbone. Other than that they had no other real intrerst in the company.

It was Cingular as a joint venture of SBC/BellSouth that purchased the original AT&T Wireless and merged it into the Cingular brand name. Then changed the name to AT&T Mobility after purchasing BellSouth.

SBC has been sucessful in highlighting the blame for bad service on the AT&T name.

reply to EPS
It was politics. SBC couldn't purchase AT&T Wireless while they were in a joint venture with BellSouth in Cingular. Once SBC purchased BellSouth they could then resurect the AT&T name.

My personal opinion is SBC wanted 100% control of Cingular and it was less expensive to purchase all of BellSouth than to purchase BellSouth's 40% of Cingular.

reply to Guy Waters