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Sprint Nextel is realigning its services and brands in a quest to return to subscriber growth. Much of its public focus has been on the Sprint 4G services, which it offers using the WiMAX network of its joint venture Clearwire, and which aims to rejuvenate Sprint's appeal to high end customers. But its most successful offerings recently have been prepaid, and it is preparing a new brand strategy in this market too.

The cellco had reorganized its prepaid services to target individual customer segments more precisely, based around four differentiated brands. These are Virgin Mobile, which Sprint acquired last year, Boost Mobile, Assurance Wireless and Broadband2Go.

Virgin will see the greatest change in its structure and targeting and will be heavily geared to one of the key boom areas in wireless, mobile social networking. This will feed into its existing strength among younger subscribers, but its brand will be far more narrowly focused than before on customers who, as Sprint CEO Dan Hesse explained, "use text and data services to power constant connection with their social networks". Rather than per-minute tariffs, Virgin will offer unlimited messaging, email, web access and data starting at $25 a month on four handsets. To reinforce the focus on constant messaging, one of these is a BlackBerry, a rarity among prepaid phones, (the model is the Curve 8530).

Hesse added: "We brought together the resources and experience of the Boost and Virgin Mobile teams in late 2009. Since that time, we have been developing the critical pieces of our multibrand prepaid strategy."

Boost Mobile will continue to focus mainly on voice, offering unlimited calling plans. Assurance Wireless will be for very budget conscious customers (it receives government subsidies to provide free mobile services to poor households, but will now have its own commercial per-minute brand). Finally, Broadband2Go offers prepaid mobile broadband services for PCs.

In its most recent quarter, Sprint lost 578,000 postpaid customers but added 348,000 prepaid customers and is now the second largest prepaid operator after MVNO TracFone Wireless, with 11m prepaid users.

"The way traditional telecom plans are oriented, it's all around big buckets of minutes, and on top of that, if you want to get text and data, they're typically bolt-on or add-on packages," Dan Shulman, head of Sprint's prepaid division, told ConnectedPlanet. "These young, data-oriented, constantly connected customers, in order to get that functionality, are paying for all these minutes that they never use." He added that the four brands would not all be offered in all markets. "We will focus on that on a ZIP code by ZIP code basis," he said.

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