How many times have you sat in a meeting to discuss a marketing initiative only to have blank stares as a return of your hard efforts?

Before an executive embarks on a brand revitalization project, one of the most commonly missed steps is the internal audit of the organization’s employees.

It’s often been said “It all starts at home”. I would recommend that you let that advice ring true at your company as well.

Whether it turns out to be good or bad news, the involvement of the organization’s most valuable assets (the staff) should be considered to equate to that of at least 50% of your research. As a matter of fact, the disgruntled employee may even start out not caring and lash out in their minds over the request for opinion, but will typically end up giving you a sound response at how your brand or overall identity feels to them.

Give it a shot and you won’t regret it. Spontaneous e-mail surveys won’t garner 100% participation (they never do), but it will get you a quick temperature.

And so begins the next-largest brand/identity change for at&t since, well, at&t.

On Monday, Cingular, the cute jax-persona that made me think that a new brand CAN exist and prosper (and subsequently change this former at&t wireless customer’s opinion of the company) will change once again to become what made many customers unhappy in the first place: at&t.

While AT&T Wireless is long gone, the name consitutes such a horrid history in my mind. I grew up in business watching AT&T become a conglomerate, get deregulated, then try to claw and scratch it’s way back to exactly where it started. Amazing.

I tend to fancy myself a brand student for life. I am always willing (and quite able in most cases) to learn the brand process and why the decisions being made (at the cost of over a billion dollars, by the way) make customer sense. This is one of those times where having experience inside the rooms where these decisions are made pays no dividends.

I’m sure someplace in a room on the 74th floor of a beautiful corporate palace there’s a marketing executive who did a great job convincing the uppers of how this should be done (with, of course, a great deal of expensive help from their agency), but as a former customer, I will now be assured of staying exactly that: a former customer.

So - for after all of the work in “raising the bar”, thanks for letting down the brand.

First, Happy New Year!

Second, there’s a fantastic article which gives more background on a worthwhile and very creative project called “One Laptop per Child”. We applaud and cheer the design, ingenuity and sheer separatist movement to create a new OS based both in usability and creative design.

Cheers!