Cingular vs AT&T brand
I admit to wondering why AT&T decided to drop the Cingular brand after their merger. As a Canadian who is not within that market, all we see is spillover advertising. Just from that, it struck me that Cingular perhaps had a better brand image and more compelling ads. But then I'm sure AT&T considered it carefully before they made that decision. Although it's not unheard of for an aquiring entity just to assume their brand/business methods/etc. are better.
Techdirt has a post entitled When Choosing Between Two Brands, Why Keep The Less Popular One? that gets into this issue.
Its interesting not just for the Cingular / AT&T instance, but for branding in general. I often obtain trade-marks for the branding of small businesses that don't have the budgets to spend on professional branding exercises. A common comment is that they did not realize how difficult it was to make branding decisions until they had to try to figure it out for themselves.