A bevy of brands

As a result of SBC's pending acquisition of AT&T, AT&T, a subsidiary of SBC, will be selling Cingular Wireless services to its own (AT&T's, that is) enterprise customers. That's a whole bunch of brands.

If that's not confusing enough, Cingular, itself 60%-owned by SBC, acquired AT&T Wireless last year, and one of its big reasons for doing so supposedly was because AT&T Wireless had made itself a leading brand among enterprise customers. Yet, Cingular has done away with the AT&T Wireless brand.

So, if you follow--and if you do, please help me--enterprise customers who've been approached by these companies in the last couple years may have four different brand names to get straight in their minds, though all those brands belong (more or less) to the same company. I guess Ed Whitacre won't care as long as it all flows to the same bottom line, but SBC could have avoided all this just by buying AT&T Wireless predecessor McCaw Cellular back in the early 1990s. (Is anyone using the McCaw brand?)

The other brand bungle in this deal has to do with the name of AT&T's MVNO. Is it still going to be AT&T-branded? Granted, a lot of these questions are still being addressed, and probably won't be resolved until the acquisition is actually approved, but it seems kind of odd for AT&T to use its own wireless brand in the enterprise market if that brand will be completely new to everyone.

There's evidence that it can work in the consumer business--Nextel Communications operates the Boost Mobile brand for a young demographic. But, it seems like all involved--SBC, AT&T, Cingular and AT&T's MVNO--would save a lot of marketing money if they just changed the name of the whole damn thing to "AT&T." That would at least be less confusing for all those enterprise customers who supposedly were buying AT&T Wireless services.

E-mail me at doshea@primediabusiness.com.