According to AdAge, the Cingular name will be dropped in 2007 in favor of, wait for it, AT&T Wireless. It was totally baffling to me when they dropped SBC – which resonated as a more contemporary brand than AT&T. But dumping the Cingular brand just strikes me as nuts! So, you build a brand that is a magnet for youth; reflects hi-tech, and attracts a real market – and then you kill it. This pretty much says it:

Karl Barnhart, managing director, CoreBrand, New York, a former AT&T agency, agreed that changing the Cingular name “doesn’t make sense.” Cingular’s brand is “relevant for the younger audience; it’s a fun, hip, interesting, dynamic — everything you don’t think about AT&T.”

I get that if they start doing bundling then then a core brand for all services might resonate. Frankly, I am more likely to buy that brand from Cingular who I don’t associate with slow moving service and years gone by. They should take every dollar they might have spent on this brand transition and put it towards getting consistent billing systems in place, launching new VOIP services and driving the cost of DSL down.