By Katie Deighton
Advertising veteran Colleen DeCourcy is joining Sonos, the audio equipment company still trying to recover from a 2024 botched app update, to repair its brand and lead a new marketing strategy.
DeCourcy will begin as chief marketing officer in January, Sonos said during its earnings call on Wednesday to discuss its financial results. Revenue declined 4.9%, to $1.44 billion, in the fiscal year through Sept. 27 but rose 12.7% in the latest quarter, according to the company.
Glitches caused by the May 2024 update rendered some customers' sound systems faulty at best and essentially useless at worst and cost the company at least $100 million in revenue in the six months following the update, Sonos said last November. Its stock remained down 42% a year after the incident, although it has since recovered.
Board member Tom Conrad stepped in as chief executive in July, initially pursuing a turnaround strategy focused on improving the reliability of the company's existing products. Sonos will now shift focus to adding customers and increasing the number of devices each of its customer households uses, Conrad said on the earnings call.
"Part of growing households is going to be about doing a better job of telling a full-funnel marketing message from driving awareness with the Sonos system to gaining consideration among consumers and then driving to purchase," Conrad said. For new households, "we'll do that through better gateway products, more compelling experiences, better differentiation and stronger marketing."
DeCourcy and Sonos declined to elaborate on specifics around her new role.
DeCourcy was most recently the head of marketing and chief creative officer of technology company Snap, where she led Snapchat's brand strategy. She previously ran the creative departments of several global advertising agencies, including Omnicom network TBWA and Nike collaborator Wieden+Kennedy. She gained a reputation along the way as one of the first creative leaders to embrace digital tools and technology before the internet upended the advertising industry entirely.
Longtime Sonos executive Lindsay Whitworth had led the company's marketing as interim CMO since February, when Jordan Saxemard departed after just under a year in the role.
Write to Katie Deighton at katie.deighton@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 05, 2025 19:03 ET (00:03 GMT)
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