Carolyn Meacher, vice-president of brand and marketing communications for the company, says the move was precipitated by a number of significant changes in the telecommunications space.

First, AT&T Canada was renamed Allstream last year and stopped using the AT&T brand name — a result of a massive restructuring that wiped out US-based AT&T Corp.'s stake in the Toronto-based firm. Allstream was subsequently bought by Manitoba Telecom Services earlier this year.

Meanwhile, AT&T Corp. — one of the world's biggest suppliers of long-distance phone services — sold its US cable assets and spun off its wireless holdings into a separate US-based company, AT&T Wireless Services.

AT&T Wireless will still own one-third of Rogers Wireless but the Canadian company has decided it no longer needs the brand name of its bigger American cousin. The impetus for the original licensing of AT&T by Rogers was to draw attention to its wireless services in Canada.

"Rogers AT&T Wireless was the only one supporting the AT&T name in Canada. That created an opportunity for us to really strengthen our ties with the other Rogers companies and to clarify our brand position in Canada," Meacher says.

"As co-branding arrangements evolve, sometimes there's a need to clarify. AT&T is a separate brand and this created a good opportunity for us to streamline our brand. It allows us to focus and leverage relationships with the rest of the company. It also makes it very clear what Rogers stands for in the marketplace since we're dealing with a single brand," she says.

The rest of the company includes Rogers Cable, a provider of cable television services, Rogers Video, a nationwide chain of 274 video stores, Rogers Media, a publisher of more than 50 magazines and periodicals and owner of more than 30 radio stations and a pair of television stations, and our course, Rogers Wireless. Combined, they have annual revenues of more than CND$ 3.5 billion. "As a brand, we stand for innovation and customer respect. Each company brings something different to that brand name, and we will all be supporting core tenets of the brand," she says.

Darryl Levy, president of Rogers’ MidWest division, says the AT&T brand had, for all intents and purposes, "gone by the wayside." Now Rogers can focus on integrating the brands with customer solutions.

"A wireless customer may also be a customer of our video business, publishing business or our cable business so there is the opportunity for the bundling of their bills. Instead of getting three or four bills, they'll get one along with special offers and co-marketing [material]. The whole [of Rogers] is greater than the sum of its parts. We're able to leverage customers' experiences over a plethora of Rogers businesses," he says.

He agrees that the brand streamlining makes good business sense and provides clarity to its customers.

"When our customers think of Rogers, they won't think of a cell phone company or a video store company, they'll think 'who's the company that can provide all my communication, entertainment and information services one-stop shopping all on one bill?' That's Rogers," he says.

Both Levy and Meacher note that the Rogers corporate brand is inextricably linked to Ted Rogers, the company's founder and CEO. The 70-year-old has been instrumental in building the multi-media empire over the years after starting out with a single FM station in Toronto in the early 1960s. Rogers comes by his entrepreneurial spirit naturally. His father, Edward Rogers Sr., was the inventor of the first battery-less radio receiver.

Geoff Kirbyson is a business reporter with the Winnipeg Free Press in Canada.