Vice President of Marketing Snap Leaves End of November – Variety

Snap's Vice President of Marketing and Brand Identity, Steve LaBella, is leaving the company, Cheddar announced Friday morning. The news of the move comes just a day after CEO Evan Spiegel called for better marketing and communication in a company-wide memo.

LaBella will remain until the end of November; there is no word yet about a potential replacement. He joined Snap in the spring of 2016. Previously, LaBella had worked for about a decade for Mattel and Fisher Price, most recently as the global vice president of global marketing for the toy maker.

His departure comes at the end of a difficult year for the company, which experienced difficulties after a failed repetition of design earlier this year. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel highlighted some of the difficulties in a memo sent to employees this week, first published by Cheddar on Thursday.

"We rushed our new design, solving a problem but creating many others, "wrote Spiegel in the memo. He admitted that the company had underestimated the frustration that the new design would cause in users, and indicated that he was misled by focusing on the wrong things. "The biggest mistake we made in our new design was compromising the core value of our product, which is the fastest way to communicate.

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According to Spiegel, society should once again become a communication tool first and foremost. This would not only keep existing users and encourage them to use the product more, but also to gain new users.

"Today, many older users consider Snapchat as a waste of time or a waste of time because they think that Snapchat is a social media rather than a means of faster communication," Spiegel wrote. . "Changing the design language of our product and improving our marketing and communications around Snapchat will help users understand our value."

In the past, Spiegel had argued that the application was too complicated for new users, with an unclear value proposition. In this new memo, Spiegel seemed to say that the solution to this problem was not an evolution of Snapchat, but a return to its roots and its fundamental purpose of communication between groups of close friends. In fact, the memo uses the word "communicate" more than 40 times.

The idea that a solution to Snapchat's problems has been an integral part of the product since the very beginning of its mandate is also a clear challenge for the company's messaging, with LaBella being one of the key people to blame. As Spiegel says, "It is imperative to provide the value of our core product and do a better job by differentiating Snapchat by communicating that value to new users."

The rating, as well as the departure of LaBella, seemed to inspire little confidence in Snap's investors. After briefly sending the company's share price to a record low of $ 7.62 following the release of the memo on Thursday, the stock continued trading in negative territory on Friday, down 1.7 % compared to the opening price of the day.