Cingular and AT&T: A lesson in brand confusion (and wasted money) Jason 21 Nov 2005

Cingular to be rebranded as AT&T? And this is after Cingular has spent tens of millions trying to erase the AT&T wireless brand from consumer’s memories. Very odd indeed. Get even more confused over at Engadget:

Anyway, we can get why they’re doing it — SBC, which was one of the Baby Bells spun off from AT&T during the big break up of 1984, is officially changing its name to AT&T and they want to unify all the branding — but man, are things getting confusing. As you’ll recall, last year Cingular snapped up AT&T Wireless, which had been spun off from AT&T in 2001 for the princely sum of $41 billion. They then spent the better part of the past year spending tons of time and money trying to eliminate the AT&T Wireless brand and integrate its network, subscribers, and services into Cingular. The integration is pretty much done (or close to it), but now they’re going to go through all that again, except in reverse, which means that some of you out there will go from being AT&T Wireless subcribers, to Cingular subscribers, only to become AT&T Wireless subscribers all over again.

And this is good for whom?