e company's hometown paper, the Newark Star Ledger, asked, "If you pull the consumer long-distance business out of AT&T Corp., is it really still AT&T?" On the other coast, the Los Angeles Times reported that "Wall Street showed little enthusiasm for reports of spinning [off] consumer long distance." One influential industry analyst, Scott Cleland, asked, "Why would AT&T be willing to ditch its 60-million residential long-distance customers when nearly every other company sees a large customer base as the key to selling big bundles of other services such as cable and high-speed Internet ac- cess?" Even the head of the FCC bureau responsible for regulating phone companies weighed in: "I think we would definitely want to be very vigilant about the consumer ramifications." Despite more than fifteen years of competition, even knowledgeable regulators and bu- reaucrats thought of AT&T as the carrier of last resort. Your Customers Own Your Brand AT&T managers were understandably proud of the company's brand. In 2000, the Interbrand consultancy ranked it the tenth most valuable Tough Calls brand in the world and the number one brand in communication ser- vices. To be sure, that was at least in part thanks to the more than $8 billion that the company was estimated to have spent on advertising over the previous decade. But while raw marketing power can build familiarity with and even knowledge of a company, it cannot create the customer attitude that is at the root of purchase decisions and other supportive behavior. It can't manufacture trust. Customers trusted AT&T to an extent that surprised even those of us within the company. More than two-thirds of consumers agreed that "AT&T is a company I can trust" in surveys taken as late as the first half of 2001. As we probed those attitudes, we discovered that feelings of trust are predominantly based on a consumer's personal experience with a company's products and services, including the cus- tomer support with which it surrounds them. Other factors- advertising, word of mo