The New T-Mobile marketing onslaught is still a few months away
Seeing as how T-Mobile spent almost two whole years tirelessly trying to obtain all the necessary approvals to merge with Sprint, you may have expected last week's big announcement to be followed by an onslaught of expensive ads and quirky publicity stunts aimed at highlighting the importance of this industry-transforming move.
But while the "Un-carrier" did make a decent amount of noise on social media immediately after confirming the long-awaited completion of its Sprint acquisition, said buzz quickly wound down. And although T-Mo wasted no time kicking off the improvement and expansion work of its impressively widespread but not remarkably fast 5G network, it's safe to assume integrating Sprint's vital mid-band spectrum will be a fairly lengthy process.
As it turns out, the same goes for the incorporation of Sprint's brand from a marketing standpoint, as the big "New T-Mobile" push might not begin until "midsummer." That timeframe was actually shared by T-Mo's freshly minted CEO in a CNBC interview last week, and analysts quoted by LightReading seem to agree that's likely to prove the right time for the "formal introduction to the market" of a powerful new rival for the Verizon/AT&T duopoly.
Straight off the bat, New T-Mobile will essentially match the subscriber numbers of the nation's top two wireless service providers while completely crushing them in terms of the 5G speed/coverage equation.
You can obviously expect a lot of ruckus on that front starting around July 1, which is reportedly labeled as "day one" internally. "Day zero", of course, was April 1, with T-Mobile likely taking these three extra months to carefully devise its new advertising strategy under John Legere replacement Mike Sievert, as well as try to tie up all the remaining procedural and legal loose ends.
As you can imagine, the full-blown New T-Mobile promotional launch may have been slightly delayed by the coronavirus pandemic too, even though Sievert told CNBC the "summer time frame" has "always been" the company's "intention."
In case you're wondering, the Sprint brand will apparently not go away "completely." Then again, it's unclear exactly what that means when the intention is to "unify under the T-Mobile brand" and "market with all of our stores and all of our advertising and all our offers in a unified way." How will the Sprint brand live on when all that happens?
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