Sprint's CEO Shakes Up Executive Ranks, Chief Marketing Officer to Leave

By Ryan Knutson 

Sprint Corp.'s new Chief Executive Marcelo Claure is shuffling top executives as he tries to turn around the nation's struggling, third-place wireless carrier.

"It's often said that the people are the greatest asset of a company. I disagree," Mr. Claure wrote in the memo distributed to Sprint employees last week. "The right people are the most important asset."

In the memo, Mr. Claure named the more than two dozen executives who are part of his core leadership team and announced two new positions of chief experience officer and chief procurement officer. He also said three senior Sprint executives including Jeff Hallock, Sprint's chief marketing officer who oversaw Sprint's "Framily" marketing campaign, would be departing.

Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son installed Mr. Claure as CEO in August to fix Sprint, which is trying to reverse years of losing money and customers. The carrier has been dogged by a network whose quality is worse than its rivals' and cellphone pricing plans that Mr. Claure has called confusing. In the recent quarter, Sprint lost 336,000 of the industry's most lucrative customers, more than any of the big four U.S. carriers.

Mr. Claure came in after Mr. Son dropped his pursuit to acquire smaller rival T-Mobile US Inc. And in his first three months on the job, Mr. Claure has been busy. Sprint launched new pricing plans and scrapped its "Framily" marketing campaign. The carrier also said recently it was letting go of about 2,000 employees and creating new executive level positions.

In the memo, Mr. Claure said he was appointing Sprint executive Bob Johnson to the newly created position of chief experience officer to improve customer service, and hired Frank Boyer, an outside consultant, as chief procurement officer.

Mr. Boyer will "oversee our efforts to evaluate where we spend every dollar and look for ways to improve our cost structure," Mr. Claure said.

On Monday, Sprint said it was bringing in Douglas Michelman, former head of corporate communications for Visa Inc., as senior vice president of corporate communications to replace Bill White who will leave the carrier at the end of the year.

Matt Carter, head of Sprint's enterprise business is also departing the company, according to Mr. Claure's memo.

Sprint's "Framily" marketing campaign, which was headed up by the outgoing Mr. Hallock, was one of the first initiatives Mr. Claure cut when taking over. The offer reduced a customer's bill when more people were added to the wireless plan.

Sprint's new strategy mimics the shareable data plans offered by AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Corp., but Sprint offers more data at a cheaper price.

At an investor conference last week, Mr. Claure said Sprint would soon launch an aggressive marketing campaign that would emphasize the idea that Sprint is the lowest cost wireless provider.

"I can tell you that you ain't seen nothing yet," Mr. Claure said of their coming ad campaign. "We are going to make it a very clear point...we are going to be the leader in pricing."

Over the weekend, Sprint released a new commercial featuring a goat, meant to represent AT&T and Verizon, that screams when it learns of how cheap Sprint's cellphone plans are.

Meanwhile, Mr. Claure said last week that Sprint would be looking to hire talented people from across the globe.

"You're going to be surprised in the next 60 to 90 days that talent, the caliber of talent that we're attracting to Sprint," he said. "I'm assembling a team of people that have done this before that are world-class leaders that have decided to come and join us."

Earlier this month, Sprint said Nikesh Arora, a former Google executive recently hired at SoftBank, was joining Sprint's board.

Last month, Sprint brought in Junichi Miyakawa from Sprint's owner, SoftBank, into a newly created position of Technical Chief Operating Officer. Mr. Miyakawa will relocate to Sprint's headquarters in Kansas from Japan and oversee the company's current network chiefs John Saw and Stephen Bye.

Mr. Claure also announced the creation of a unit that will focus on the rapidly growing minority segments of the U.S. population, and is seeking someone to lead the group, according to the memo.

Write to Ryan Knutson at [e-mail]

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