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Shopping Centers Today -> September 2002
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EX-MARKETERS STILL SERVE INDUSTRY
Many former shopping center marketing directors found that their companies left them, not the other way around. Nevertheless, they have landed on their feet, often to find themselves still serving the industry.
“Being laid off is a motivator,” deadpans Charlotte Ellis, SCMD, who headed corporate marketing for Konover Property Trust until it abandoned the factory outlet business. She has now formed Ellis & Others, a Cary, N.C.-based consulting firm.
Like Ellis, most shopping center veterans opt to continue in the industry, and say that their time in the business prepared them well for life and work on their own.
The easiest transition appears to be for those who left large companies.
“If you were with Homart [Development Co.] or Simon [Property Group], you have connections all over the country,” noted Kristine Sandrick, SCMD, who worked for both companies before founding Chicago-based Sandrick Communications in 1996. “Some folks at Homart were among my first clients.” (Homart was acquired by General Growth Properties in 1995.)
Sandrick has since expanded her communications consultancy beyond shopping centers to nonprofit and businesses in other fields.
The key is to create a business that uses the same skills and techniques previously learned in the corporate world. In his marketing posts at JMB/Federated Realty and The Rouse Co., Stanley L. Eichelbaum, SCMD, oversaw consumer research and sales analysis. These same disciplines helped him when he founded Marketing Developments, a Cincinnati-based consulting firm that provides urban planning services, among other things.
Laurie Wolfe, SCMD, who rose through the marketing ranks at Forest City Enterprises before founding Cherry Hill, N.J.-based Signature Premium Ideas, an industry promotions company, says she uses most of the same systems and analyses for her own company that she employed as a marketing director.
So even though their original employers took away their jobs, they at least left them with careers.
— D.H.
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