The Southwestern Bell brand
died Tuesday. It was 82.
It will be joined in the
afterlife by its sisters Pacific Bell, 122, and Ameritech, 9.
The phone companies will now
simply be SBC, letters that once stood for Southwestern Bell Corp. But no
longer.
San Antonio-based telecom
giant SBC Communications, which owns the three companies, said it's adopting a
national brand name across its 13-state local-phone operations to unify its
image. It's following the lead of other Baby Bells such as the former Bell
Atlantic, which is now Verizon Communications.
"It's the spreading of the
corporate DNA," said A. Michael Noll, a professor at the University of Southern
California's Annenberg School of Communications.
The change will strip the
historic "Bell" moniker from all but two members of the Bell family. Only
BellSouth and Cincinnati Bell use the term.
The company has planned the
change for three years. Phone bills were changed effective Tuesday, and many of
the company's buildings and trucks have sported the SBC name and logo for some
time, said spokesman Larry Solomon.
"The heritage will remain,"
Mr. Solomon said. "The legacy will remain. It's simply a new name."
With one exception:
Fulfilling a promise to state regulators, SBC's Connecticut operations will
continue to use the name SBC SNET, which previously stood for Southern New
England Telecommunications.
Mr. Solomon wouldn't say how
much the rebranding will cost. Customer awareness of the SBC name is already
high, particularly in California and the Midwest, where its acquisition and
integration of Pacific Bell and Ameritech have garnered significant media
coverage.
The Southwestern Bell brand
was adopted for AT&T's local operations in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas and
Arkansas in April 1920. Seven years ago, Southwestern Bell Corp. changed to SBC
Communications.
The Pacific Bell name was
first used in 1880 and was discontinued in 1889, when the West Coast company
changed its name to Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Co. It was brought back in
1984 by Pacific Telesis, the Baby Bell that also owned Nevada Bell. In 1997, SBC
bought Pacific Telesis.
In the Midwest, five
separate brands – Illinois Bell, Indiana Bell, Michigan Bell, Ohio Bell and
Wisconsin Bell – prevailed until April 1993, when parent Ameritech imposed its
single brand. SBC bought Ameritech in 1999.
Even though some phone
company names have been around for decades, many have gone through several
rounds of changes, said Herb Hackenburg, executive director of the Telephone
History Group in Denver. American Telephone & Telegraph (1885), for example, is
now simply AT&T.
"There are a lot of
precedents for gobbling up telephone companies," he said. "Northwestern Bell
gobbled up over 400 telephone companies, including some relatively large
companies like Nebraska Bell."
In 1984, Northwestern Bell
became part of US West, which was bought by Qwest Communications International
in June 2000.
Name changes over the last
few years have been driven by companies' desire to establish national and global
identities. When Bell Atlantic and Irving-based GTE Corp. merged in June 2000,
they chose to craft an entirely new word – Verizon.
Until recently, SBC was
content with letting its acquired operations retain their own identities. But it
imposed the corporate image in September 2001 by forcing local brands to add the
SBC prefix to their names, ala SBC Southwestern Bell.
Experts say its latest move
is a logical extension as the company increasingly goes up against who else but
the Bell family matriarch, AT&T.
Changing the name will make
it easier for SBC to compete nationally with AT&T for business customers, said
Courtney Quinn, a senior analyst with the Yankee Group, a Boston consulting
firm.
The new name is also a way
to tell consumers the company doesn't sell only plain old telephone service.
"It's a much broader promise
of access and connectivity and control, to some degree, over your life," said
Julie Cottineau, managing director of naming for Interbrand, a consulting firm.
"The burden is now on the
company's to imbue this empty vessel with meaning," Ms. Cottineau said.
What about the last keepers
of the "Bell" heritage? How long will they hold out?
"It's our position that the
name Cincinnati Bell has tremendous value," said spokeswoman Jenny Kues.
Said BellSouth spokesman
Jeff Battcher: "The company loves the Bell name. We have absolutely no plans to
change it."
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