With the back-to-school season in full swing, amid a housing slump and facing prospects of tough holiday selling ahead, home retailer Sears Holdings has lost two high-level marketing executives.
Sears Holdings chief marketing officer Maureen McGuire is leaving her post for unspecified “personal reasons” at the end of the month, the company announced late Thursday. Sears Roebuck & Co. CMO Richard Gerstein will step in to the top marketing job for the whole company, including both the Sears and Kmart brands.
McGuire has served as CMO for Sears Holdings since 2005 and in that capacity hired new marketing leaders for Sears Roebuck, Sears home and Kmart—including Gerstein in July of 2007. Previously Gerstein was global chief marketing officer of Alberto-Culver Beauty.
Meanwhile Mark Good departed Friday as president of Sears Home Services. The company announced Friday that it has appointed Stu Reed as the new president of the home services division, which sells parts and repairs for home appliances and manages home improvement and remodeling operations.
Reed comes to Sears from a post as president of mobile devices at Motorola, and before that as head of that company’s integrated supply division. No reasons were given for the departure of Good, who joined Sears in 1997 and led its home services business—one of the more successful of Sears’ divisions in recent quarters—since 1999.
Finally, Sears announced that former Procter & Gamble senior executive Guenther Trieb will take over as president of the company’s Kenmore, Craftsman and Diehard brands. Trieb was most recently vice president for P&G’s western European feminine care global business unit.
The additions of Reed and Trieb move Sears Holdings “another important step forward in the transformation of our business,” Sears interim president and CEO Bruce Johnson said in a statement.
At the direction of chairman Edward Lampert, Sears Holdings has spent much of this year reorganizing into five business units, including retail operations, support services, real estate, online business and brands. Lampert has also suggested that Sears may begin selling some of its core brands outside of its own retail outlets.
But the company has been struggling against inroads from other retailers in all categories, from apparel to home appliances. In May it reported its largest quarterly loss since Lampert merged Kmart and Sears in 2005. The company will release its second-quarter 2009 results on Thursday.
Sears has seen other executives depart in recent months. Lands’ End chief David McCreight moved to men’s sport apparel maker Under Armour in July, and Kmart chief marketing officer Bill Stewart left that division to work in public service.
Sears Holdings has also been unable to name a permanent CEO to replace Aylwin Lewis, who left that job in February after disagreements with chairman Lampert. Former Kmart executive Johnson has held the temporary post since that time.
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