PRINT THIS STORY:

CHANGE TEXT SIZE:

MARKETING HEADS COMPARE NOTES ON INDUSTRY

In the past year, Simon Property Group and Westfield America Trust have brought in new heads of marketing. Stewart Stockdale joined Simon as chief marketing officer and president of Simon Brand Ventures in September. Todd Putman joined Westfield America as vice president of corporate marketing in June.

Unlike most who take on the chief marketing role in the shopping center business, Stockdale and Putman did not grow up in the industry. Stockdale held positions at Procter & Gamble Co., MasterCard and Conseco, while Putman served at Walt Disney Co. and Princess Cruises, as well as at a different division of Procter & Gamble.

Just months into their posts, Stockdale and Putman talked with SCT Editor-at-Large Debra Hazel and each other in a conference call about their impressions of a very different business and marketing challenge.

SCT: What was your biggest surprise?

Stewart Stockdale

Stewart Stockdale: The magnitude of the marketing efforts today. I wasn’t fully aware of the magnitude of the people visiting our properties. Literally billions of people shop at our locations, and a lot of people take shopping or shopping centers for granted. The marketing of it, or the properties themselves, are not at the top of the radar screen in the world of marketing. I’ve been so incredibly pleasantly surprised at the magnitude of the opportunity that we have.

Todd Putman: That was my surprise, as well. A lot of brand companies are going to look to capture consumers, not just in a visual way, but also in a sense/touch/feel way. Both of us offer that experience. Then, the distance between that opportunity and the reality is still pretty far away. Simon has done an infinitely better job, I think, with Pepsi, with Visa, with some of those.

The delta, if you will, from where we are today to the opportunity is pretty far. But it’s a pretty easy link once you get in with these branded companies and say, “This is what we can offer: not only the [customers], but the organizations, the people on the ground to be able to deliver that.”

SCT: Your companies are probably the leaders in branding initiatives in this industry. How far has the industry come in branding?

Todd Putman

Putman: We’ve come a pretty far piece, but we’ve got a long way to go. We look at Australia, certainly, as the quintessential branded shopping experience. Westfield is synonymous with shopping or the shopping mall experience. We have a long way to go to get there, yet we have a clear belief that the fundamentals are in place for us to be able to take that ground. How we take it to that next level is the interesting challenge.

As Stewart knows, there is no book I can pull and say, “This is how it should be done.” There is no map for us. That’s part of what makes Stewart’s and my job exciting.

Stockdale: I agree to a great extent. In the States, we have this collection of properties — and it’s a collection rather than a chain — and many of the properties we have are very unique, very attuned to their local markets.

Todd said it absolutely right. There is no formula to follow. We can’t go out to another industry and just follow suit. We have to come up with our own way of getting there. There have been some valiant attempts at it here in the States, and it’s an evolution. We will continue to be a collection of properties on an ongoing basis. Now we [must] leverage that branding so that we can show the scale of what we’ve got, and more importantly, build that scale so that we can leverage it [so] that people see us as a medium. [Our] retail partners already know that. We have to do a better job at selling the value proposition to the consumer brands so that they not only think of us, but that we then deliver against the expectations from our industry.

Last, but not least, is the consumer and what type of value proposition we offer as an individual property and as a collection of properties. Then the brand will fit in. We need to sort out the role of the different brands that we have, whether it be the umbrella brand, which is Simon, or the local brands. So a lot is going on in the world of branding in malls, and it is going to be a lot of fun.

SCT: Both of you were in consumer marketing. What specific skills transfer to this industry?

Stockdale: When I started marketing, branding as a term didn’t exist — it was “advertising” at the time. The lessons of consumer brands are very relevant to our industry. A number of consumer brands co-exist in our centers. The brand of the mall, the brand of the retailers, all co-exist very nicely. And multibranding is something that some package companies do very well.

I also spent many years at MasterCard, arguably one of the most ubiquitous brands in the world, with 23,000 competing banks issuing the same brand. So co-branding is another way we could look at it. We’re looking at an overarching brand strategy for the family of brands we’ve got. Once we get that going, there are multiple ways to execute that.

Last comes creative execution. Right now we’re spending a lot of time on our brands — local, regional or national, the Simon brand, and the relationship between all these brands. Then we’ll worry about creative.

Putman: Certainly a lot of the brand architecture, the brand framework, all the learning that Stewart and I got from a [Procter & Gamble], applies to Westfield or Simon at equal levels. In a lot of ways, it’s a recognizable entity, it has value to it, so the thinking and frameworks we used in a variety of places transfer quite easily. A lot of what Stewart and I picked up about the consumer and customer — how we should think about them and look through their eyes in terms of research, measurement and understanding what they want, need and value on a day-to-day basis — is very relevant.

I haven’t actually found that the retail industry is immune to any of the branding learning we have. It has been really easy to transfer from my experiences in the branded world to this world quite quickly.

SCT: Have any of your early perceptions of this industry changed?

Putman: [The perception of] individual center marketing directors, what their capabilities are like and how I perceive they needed to change, has not changed. There is a historical belief or perception of marketing in the industry that it’s everything from balloon blowers to promotion girls. We are trying to aggressively move toward a broader general management, with probably more analytical capability, with our marketing people. They are not just responsible for a marketing event, but can look at the entire business as a retailer and shopper experience that has value to it.

We talk about a notion called “everything communicates.” Everything those folks do and don’t do communicates something about the brand and about the center.

Stockdale: We’ve actually run very hard. We’ve restructured the department, brought in some key individuals and reshaped in great part in the field. I’m more excited today than I was when I started, because I look at the opportunity ahead of us, and it’s going to be a lot of fun taking it to where we need it to go. It’s not without its challenges, as Todd pointed out.

Todd hit one of the issues of the industry point-blank: This industry has traditionally managed itself and its marketing programs at a center level. We do thousands of programs on a yearly basis — many, many programs by center — and I don’t think we do as good a job measuring the effectiveness of every one of those of events. We don’t do a lot of sharing of best practices across centers on the marketing side.

I don’t think you’ll ever get a program to fit every mall, but we have to look at segments of the customer base, which programs are relevant to which malls and how we build programs that scale across multiple properties. We have to differentiate ourselves by doing much broader-scale programs across multiple centers, so we can get this impression amongst the hundreds of millions of people coming through our doors.

SCT: Does that mean changing your training?

Stockdale: That’s an ongoing process. We’ve identified some critical platforms that we need to build across the networks and what that means not only to the corporate staff, but also the regional marketing folks — so they can start thinking of building regional plans and how they get that local marketing executive to think of their property and how it fits into other properties in their region, their market or nationally. Training and communication is a very important part of this whole shift.

Putman: We [also] are looking at specific training programs, which give a broader range of analytical and general management tools to the marketing people, so that they feel more a part of the business and can add value day in, day out. It’s becoming harder and harder for us to separate marketing from business strategy.

SCT: What do you still hope to learn?

Putman: I need to learn a lot more about the leasing side and how we can get better at communicating the improvement we’re going to make to the shopping experience back to retailers. We do not have great marketing relationships with the marketing people at retailers. I’m talking about top-to-top situations. I’d like to have much stronger relationships with the marketing staff or executives at our retailers, to be able to do more of that business-to-business communication and synergize what value we can.

Stockdale: That’s a big area, and I agree. I don’t think our retail partners do a lot of co-marketing with us on an ongoing basis, and I need to understand why. We have great relationships with our retail partners, don’t get me wrong. But how do we really start to leverage their marketing and our marketing in certain areas?

SCT: Are you having fun?

Stockdale: I’m having a great time. It’s a tremendous amount of fun. It’s a very different marketing challenge than I’ve ever had before, and I’ve been in marketing for 20 years. I’m very excited about what we can become and the prospects of consumers across this country going, “Wow, look at what this is becoming.” And I think that’s achievable. So I am having a lot of fun, and I’m more excited every day.

Putman: There are some marketers who like to stay in classic packaged-goods marketing their entire lives. They do exactly the same thing every single year. As I said before, the cool factor here is that it ain’t been done. There is no guide, there is no one to say, “You need to do what they did last year,” because it just doesn’t exist.

And this is a marketing industry. There are a lot of shoppers, a lot of consumers. There are retailers with big brands and big ideas, and it has the potential to really create a lot of value in the marketplace. We have alliances with some major companies, we have some great talent and some great capability in the field, and as Stewart and I have said again and again, the upside is so awesome. Why wouldn’t you have fun?

This interview first appeared in the December 2002 issue of the ICSC Management-Marketing-Leasing Today newsletter.

© 2008 ICSC. All rights reserved. | Terms and Conditions | Privacy Policy | Contact ICSC | ICSC Home |