AT&T could well have earned the Dimmest Bulb Award last year for its inane rebranding strategy, but the hour I just spent on the phone yesterday to understand my phone plan puts them in the running for this year, too.
When AT&T merged with SBC in 2005, at least 13,000 employees gave up their jobs to free up cash, and some consumer usage fees were raised soon thereafter, so the company was able to spend upwards of $1 billion on branding the "New AT&T." Invoices were reprinted, and trucks got shiny new paint jobs. The gurus at Interbrand bought their kids lots of high-quality orthodontia with all the fees they collected.
The next year brought mergers with BellSouth and Cingular, and then wonderfully abstract ads of AT&T logos cut in cornfields appeared in newspapers and magazines. Has-been rockers Oasis sang a 3-second theme song on TV spots (for a cool million dollar fee). Pretty much any print or electronic media outlet that would take advertising money got a slice of the humongous rebranding pie.
Well, I just ran head-long into the new AT&T brand, and it hurt.
Turns out that, for some time now, my father has been receiving two separate bills from AT&T. That means two sets of connection charges and usage fees, wrapped in confusing and perhaps overlapping plans. I decided to unravel it for him, and I’m still not sure I straightened things out.
I won't bore you with the details, but they included 4 different operators -- each of whom believed that repeating an incomprehensible answer 2 or 3 times was the same as clarifying it – and an interrogation by someone for third party verification, which challenged me to commit to actions to which I didn’t know I had committed.
Everyone I talked to had an explanation for why things were so confusing, and every excuse harkened back to the mergers.
Those billions of dollars spent on marvelous branding ads telling consumers what they should think? They'd been overlaid on company operations and technical systems that hadn’t been changed, integrated, or improved. Accounts with one company didn’t get moved to the next. One deal was a legacy, while the next wasn’t. Local toll charges were different than long distance, I think. No operator could access the totality of my dad's accounts (the schnook who could had probably been fired).
There was nothing better about the new AT&T branding except a vastly superior, enchanting new logo.
The final plan sounded ok, but one operator suggested that my failure to "live up to minimum usage requirements" (I'd no idea what those were) would result in loss of the promotional pricing (which I didn’t know that I had), and that some international calls could cost $10/minute (huh?).
The most comic moment was when the third-party whatchamacallit asked me "are you moving to AT&T local service?" to which I answered, "no, my dad already has AT&T local service." This prompted her to tell me that I had an issue with the agreement and that the process would be discontinued. Then she hung up.
Now, I don't need to gripe about the bad service, as we've all had similar experiences. But aren't such experiences the true measure of brand?
The Big Picture here is that companies need to do things better, cheaper, or somehow differently than their competitors in order to win and keep business. Soaringly beautiful advertising doesn't cut it. Promises of services don't, either. Brand emerges from the business, versus gets attached to it. Or painted over it.
Oh, I almost forgot. After going through the routine for my father, I asked to review my own account. It turns out that I, too, had been getting charged the maximum amount possible! Shame on me, of course. God forbid that a core tenet of AT&T's branding strategy were to aggressively notify customers when so-and-so-merger had changed the rules.
I asked the operator if he could make changes to my account.
"No," he replied, "you have to call back, and start the process all over again."
Right.
Part 2 of this essay will explore how AT&T could have branded itself differently.
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