Living All In

Not that this is a tech blog (tho I am a techie), but all this talk on brands, logos, marks, and tag lines comes front and center Monday when Cingular and its orange Jack splat is scuttled and the company is renamed AT&T.  The FCC rubber stamped the company’s merger late Friday and AT&T’s press room has posted the release here.

Yuck.

Is there more of a starched shirt, corporate tower mark than AT&T?  Besides IBM and Xerox of course…  Highly recognizable brands, sure.  But for what mobile phones and services have become (personal lifestyle extensions,) scuttling a highly effective brand and marketing campaign (Cingular) for a mark that screams rotary dial is mind boggling to me.  This is a case where AT&T should be a secondary heritage mark (see my Thomas Nelson logo post) utilized for business services and data network initiatives. 

If AT&T did an ad morphing Alexander Graham Bell’s first ‘can you hear me now?’ (take that Verizon!) to telegraph wires to huge fiber optic pipes underneath oceans touting innovation and a long history of doing business at the speed sound, wouldn’t you believe they had a bigger network than the geek guy and his posse from Verizon?  A bigger data network than Sprint?  Sure.  But AT&T and the iPhone?  Sounds like the chess club captain accompanying the prom queen to the ball.

I know, I know, AT&T is one of the most recognizable brands in North America and highly iconic world wide.  But American Telephone and Telegraph, no matter how you shrink it down, has a corporate first, little guy second, oppressive, and even ancient feel to it.  And ancient and corporate is the very opposite of what the wireless consumer wants to feel.  As far as BellSouth and SBC are concerned (home landline and business telecom services), the AT&T rebranding will probably be an upgrade.  But for the eclectic world of mobile subscribers, where freedom and expression are the goods of the day and the ‘every man’ is the consumer, we have to apply the soon-to-be-patented Hungry Planet branding test:

Take two brands and insert them into a futuristic movie about an organization that grows to govern the world.  Which would you choose to have a more optimistic view and less oppressive rule of the world?

AT&T or Cingular?

As my examples of Coke and Nike in the post The Perfect Mark Myth illustrate, AT&T is throwing away a mark that has great value in the personal mobile business.   All of this in favor of ’simplifying’ while ignoring the cultural climate that surrounds one of their largest markets of future growth (mobile) not to mention merely three days after the most anticipated mobile device ever is debuted as being a Cingular exclusive.

As a Cingular customer, say it ain’t so Jack.  On Monday, you’ll have succeeded in "lowering the bar" of branding to simply choosing the most famous mark instead of using your stable of marks to reach an increasingly personalized culture.