Emotions Versus Attributes? I Think They Got It!

Okay.

I have blogged about this company in the past.

A lot.

Most about their service deliverable breakdowns. Some about the lack of a positive brand experience.

Maybe its because I am an ATT customer.

But... their new ATT Wireless commercials are at least a new piece of evidence that even the big corporations can experience brand redemption!

ATT Wireless, formerly Cingular Wireless, seemed to have overdosed on the attributes of their service offering.

If it wasn’t the price deals of their roll-over minutes (remember those chips?), it was the geography of their coverage or even worse yet, the strength of the signal reflected in the rising bars of the old Cingular wireless logo!

Tonight I saw one of their commercials for the third time.

It’s the one where it opens with an American president being sworn into office and back tracks all the way to a guy seeing a girl in a New York City subway station and knows he is destined to getting on the train to sit next to her.

Its not until near to the end of the spot that you see the guy take out his mobile phone and use an app to get his subway ticket.

And to be honest, you never see the phone again.

There is no mention of the ATT coverage zones. No mention of the brand of phone the guy uses. No mention of price. No mentions really of ATT until you see the logo at the end of the spot.

Instead the spot captures the emotions of connection! And how those connection points are part of the architecture of our life.

I cannot say any of my thoughts next are actually what took place, but I might put a fifty dollar bill on the betting table that I am not too far off.

When ATT took over Cingular and changed over the brand…those guys up in the corporate office probably got the same affect with those bars as they did with Viagra!

And if they could get the surge in the bars…well they had to take on Verizon (who did those guys just think they were!) and their coverage claims.

Then, similar to Dexter of Cartoon Network's first original program, Dexter’s Lab, the cool things those gadgets could do was a rage come true!

All the while, on the agency front, there must have been a fair share of smart account planners out there saying enough with the attributes, we need to tap into the emotional deliverables of the brand experience.

And it’s a risk…a BIG risk for those agency CEOs to sit down with the ATT CMO and say that those attributes are nice…but they are not cementing a loyalty to the AT&T brand that rises above rational thought.

I can hear the CMO now… “What?”

But after the whole fiasco with the Verizon challenge that ATT CEO probably put it simply when he called the CMO into his office… “Re-energize that brand or you will be working somewhere else!”

Isn’t it interesting how crisis can elevate change!

Whatever actually happened may remain behind closed doors, but for right now, those new ATT ads are great examples of marketing the experience and not the mechanics of the product.

I also saw a television commercial over the weekend for a past home décor client of mine.

When we first delivered their brand architecture, they actually fired us.

No joke.

They thought we were nuts.

Since then, they have internalized what we recommended and it has become the architecture of their entire brand and all of the components of its delivery.

If you watch HGTV or read Elle Decor, you have probably seen it.. "Shaw. Where Great Floors Begin!"

Over the next few weeks I have some great meetings with some top CEOs.

ATT is actually a brand I intend to talk about… positively!