After Sprint’s re-branding to T-Mobile – ten billion dollars of brand value vanished?

Sprint was acquired by T-Mobile US in 2020. After the merger, T-Mobile decided to discontinue the Sprint brand name and to replace it with its own t-Mobile branding. A few month after the acquisition, the once famous Sprint brand had disappeared into oblivion.

Sprint has been a major player in the US telecom market. For many years, Sprint had spent 4% of its revenues for marketing and advertising its brand name. Sprint appeared on all of the major rankings of the most valuable brands , with a brand value between $8 and $12 billion. Was it wise from T-Mobile to simply dump this?

T-Mobile has a different story to tell. For them, the Sprint brand was of no or very little value. They acquired Sprint for its spectrum licenses and network, and for its existing customers, but not for its brand. The re-branding offered attractive synergy benefits, and the risk to destroy established customer relations (and value) was limited.

A white paper of MARKABLES covers the whole story. It discusses the longevity of brand spendings, and the circumstances that foster a successful re-branding. One key finding is that digitized customer relations make branding and brands more dispensable. Check out all the findings here.