AT&T Marketing Plan

AT&T marketing plan to project innovative, hip image
By Jon Van Tribune staff reporter
September 11, 2007
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AT&T Inc., striving to remake its image from one of stodgy dependability to a more daring, innovative and hip concern, is launching a marketing initiative Tuesday that borrows aspects of virtual reality and social networking.While the phone giant's marketing push will include traditional television commercials, billboards and print ads, it will also include an online AT&T Souvenir Store that will launch next month, inviting customers to make up their own worlds.Riding a crest of popularity of the iPhone, which operates exclusively on AT&T's wireless network, Apple announced Monday that it has now sold 1 million iPhones.
"One million iPhones in 74 days," said Steve Jobs, Apple chief. "It took almost two years to achieve that milestone with iPod."The iPhone has helped AT&T appear more youthful, said Jeff Kagan, an Atlanta-based telecom industry analyst, but acquiring a new image for the consumer market while continuing to appeal to corporate and government customers may be a challenge."AT&T is a wireless leader but it's still got this big wired business, and that's not going away," said Kagan. "This is about putting on a new youthful coat for the consumer market. It's a follow-on to what they did last year with their logo when they went from using AT&T in capital letters to using at&t in lower case."This time, AT&T will shift from using blue as its predominant color to using orange, which had been the theme for Cingular, the wireless service that AT&T has rebranded as AT&T Mobility. ."It's the corporate version of getting a new hairstyle," said Kagan.The Web-centric part of the marketing effort will encourage customers to list the cities they most often frequent, say Chicago, Austin and San Francisco, that would be turned into a mythical place, perhaps called Chitinfrisco. Customers will be invited to describe their personalities, such as whether they are "lovers" or "fighters," said Troy Ruhanen, executive vice president and managing director of BBDO North America."We use the jumble of city names to make a word, add a personality profile and then offer T-shirts or coffee mugs with slogans reflecting the places and personalties of the individual," said Ruhanen. "It's not meant to be a home page. It's more an expression of their world."