• by Larissa Faw , September 12, 2014

Telecommunications is a competitive industry. AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint all battle for the same customer. This spring, Sprint spent millions advertising a plan called Framily with a family called the Frobinsons. "We said we are going to make things different," says Marcelo Claure, the new president and CEO of Sprint, speaking at the Goldman Sachs 23rd Annual Communacopia Conference.

Well, Framily didn't work. In the first six months of the year, Sprint lost 1.4 million customers. "I spoke to few people who were in the stores and we have about 2,000 doors of dealers. They said it’s really hard to sell. Our plans are confusing or marketing was a hamster talking to people. We are having a hard time selling the products. So, what we did is that we basically completely changed our value proposition."

Sprint is focused "100% in terms of changing its advertising," says Claure, to instead bring the right value proposition to customers. The company has put its advertising account in review.

Now, the brand has ditched the Frobinsons to launch the Family Share Pack. "We just kept it simple and it’s always going to be simple," says Claure. "It’s going to be the same price or lower price than AT&T and Verizon and we are always going to give you double the data. And the reason why we did that is I don’t know if any of you know gigs and gigabytes and megabytes, but I don’t."

Ultimately, Sprint realizes that it has to compete with straight-forward advertising, rather than obscure messaging. "Whenever you got to make a choice of why you are going to buy a phone, you are going to buy it because of pricing," says Claure. "That was the T-Mobile play, the value play or you are going to buy because of network. And that’s a Verizon and AT&T play. And unfortunately up to a month ago, we stood nowhere. We were the most expensive. And our network, it’s a work in progress. So, you are going to see us now be the value driver and then you are going to see us potentially in the market for really strong advertisement network, which means if you can have price on networks, I think you have a winning value proposition."