AT&T brings Cingular into brand fold

AT&T announced that it will begin a marketing and advertising campaign Monday to fold the Cingular Wireless brand, and market the company's wireless services under the AT&T name.

"Around the world, our customers recognize the AT&T brand for meaningful innovation, a commitment to customer service, high quality and exceptional reliability," said Edward Whitacre, chairman and CEO of AT&T, in a statement. "AT&T, BellSouth and Cingular are now one company, and going to market with our services under one brand is the right thing to do."

Cingular has been building its brand since 2000 when BellSouth and SBC Communications decided to merge their myriad wireless operations into one nationwide carrier. AT&T has its own history as a wireless brand. One of the oldest wireless carriers in the U.S., AT&T Corp. spun off its wireless arm in 2001, where it continued as a separate company until 2004 when Cingular acquired it and killed off the AT&T Wireless name. In re-creating AT&T Wireless, however, this time AT&T is dropping the “Wireless” addendum.

AT&T Consumer Assistant Vice President Tyler Wallis said that the company is positioning all of its division as simply “AT&T”, not separating out each individual product or category. Just like AT&T’s DSL services and VoIP services are all sold by a single AT&T, it’s wireless services will be sold by AT&T, Wallis said. Wallis conceded that the Cingular name is still a very powerful brand that the wireless carrier has poured untold amounts of resources into building and maintain, but ultimately it has to go.

“It’s really hard to communicate that all of these services are tied together if AT&T and its wireless group are operating under separate names,” Wallis said.

While the AT&T logo will be prominent in all TV and print advertising and communications, the ads will initially include a transitional graphic with both the AT&T and Cingular logos as part of the brand transition, the statement read. During the transition, the campaign will integrate popular imagery, phrases and icons from Cingular's traditional advertising, including the "raising the bar" tag line, the "Jack" character and the color orange.

As part of the re-branding initiative, about 2000 nationwide company-owned wireless retail outlets and store kiosks will be transitioned over the coming year with AT&T-branded signage. Additionally, the approximately 15,000 personnel in these stores and kiosks will begin wearing AT&T-branded apparel in the coming months.

AT&T also said it will be leveraging the the existence of many Cingular retail stores around the country to begin using them to market the AT&T "media experience," offering demonstrations and trial of several different kinds of services.