• by Aaron Baar , September 11, 2009

For AT&T, the benefit of success that comes as the exclusive carrier of the iPhone may very well also be a burden.

Amid press reports that AT&T's network is having trouble keeping up with its customers' data usage (directly related to the iPhone adoption), company perception among adults has dropped steadily over the summer, according to YouGovPolimetrix's BrandIndex, which measures daily consumer perception of brands.

"There's been a significant amount of high-profile press in the past couple of weeks about AT&T's data problems," Ted Marzilli, CEO of YouGovPolimetrix, tells Marketing Daily. "There's no question it implies that there are some serious concerns for AT&T and Apple as they consider [extending the exclusivity of] the iPhone."

According to the company, AT&T's "Index" score (which is the average of its Quality, Value, Satisfaction, Recommendation, Reputation and Impression scores) has been dropping since mid-June. On June 16, the company's Index score was 18.3. By Sept. 10, it had dropped to 14.6. (By comparison, Verizon Wireless' score on Sept. 10 was 21.2, about the same as it was at the beginning of the year.) The company's biggest score drops were on the Quality and Recommend scales, suggesting that stories addressing data outages were having an effect on company perception.

"I think there's still only a small number of people who've given up the iPhone and AT&T," Marzilli says. "I think there's a larger number of people who want to buy an iPhone, but are hesitating because of these problems with AT&T's data coverage."

In the meantime, some damage control may be in order for AT&T [such as] putting together a plan to tell the public how they're going to address the problem and a timeline for putting it into place, Marzilli says. "AT&T has to work very, very hard to make sure those [iPhone] subscribers are profitable and happy, particularly before the exclusivity agreement runs out. Because once they leave, it's going to be very hard to get them back."