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CENTERS CAUGHT IN WINDOW FIGHT

BY JON SPRINGER

Photo: Laurie Lambrecht

What tenants put in their windows is generally their business, but groups protesting what they consider to be indecent displays at lingerie stores and other retailers have lately been making it everyone’s business.

In Lincoln, Neb., in February, a Christian group protested what it called “the most sexualized walkway in Lincoln” at that city’s South Pointe Pavilion lifestyle center. The group was objecting to the racy window displays of tenants Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch. Meanwhile, a similar group was taking aim at a Victoria’s Secret store in a mall in Idaho.

“I don’t think this is a problem that’s just going to go away,” said Julie Lattimer, marketing director of South Pointe Pavilion, the Lincoln epicenter of the controversy that made local and national news in February. “With tenants and businesses marketing to Generation X and Generation Y, this is one way to get through to them. And I’m quite sure that as long as it’s successful, it won’t change.”

It’s no issue limited to “the sticks,” either. A year or so ago, The New York Times reported that a Victoria’s Secret store under construction on Manhattan’s Upper West Side had been the subject of a letter-writing campaign from local residents objecting to large images of scantily clad women in its windows.

At issue in all of these situations are age-old questions of community decency standards and the limits of suggestiveness in advertising — limits that some feel are being regularly tested on both sides of the fence these days. To be sure, it’s not limited to shopping centers. Miller Lite’s “catfight” television ad, for instance, has been a recent source of controversy. But the issue takes on extra importance in shopping centers, because it threatens the nature of the three-pronged relationship of landlord, tenant and consumer.

For a shopping center, extricating itself from these controversies requires a balancing act of diplomacy and sensitivity. And, according to some observers, those are skills that marketers and managers ought to learn now.

“Right, wrong, or indifferent, this [suggestiveness] is the direction a lot of advertising is going in today,” said Charlotte Ellis, SCMD, president of Ellis & Others, a Raleigh, N.C.-based shopping center management consulting firm. “Just pick up a copy of Interview magazine and see some of the print ads in there. It’s enough to make anyone uncomfortable.”

At South Pointe, a 450,000-square-foot lifestyle center owned by Kansas City, Mo.-based Red Development and managed by St. Louis-based Colliers Turley Martin Tucker, the controversy roared to life in February. That’s when Family First, a local group associated with Colorado Springs, Colo.-based Christian organization Focus on the Family, urged South Pointe shoppers to object to the center’s Abercrombie & Fitch and Victoria’s Secret store windows. The window at Abercrombie & Fitch displayed a photograph of a topless woman covering her breasts with her hands. Directly across the walkway, Victoria’s Secret’s window featured images of racy lingerie for Valentine’s Day.

Lattimer said she had received a few phone calls complaining about the displays and feared the situation could get out of hand. Sure enough, her next phone call was from an Associated Press reporter, a Family First press release in hand, seeking comment.

Though Family First did not demonstrate at the site, the publicity the group generated drew local and national attention toward South Pointe. Television reporters, in particular, couldn’t resist a story promising lingerie and children.

“We had to tread very carefully with our tenants, our customers and the media,” Lattimer says. “We did our best to support our tenants while at the same time trying to define our role.”

What protesters and the media needed to understand, Lattimer said, was that malls don’t do windows. By virtue of lease agreements, the property owner has virtually no power to demand that a tenant change window displays, provided nothing is illegal about them. The best the mall can do is to alert the corporate parents of the retailer to the objections and make it clear to consumers that the center understands their concerns.

“The key was trying to turn it into a positive for the center,” said Lattimer. “It was very easy to get drawn into a debate about sex in advertising, and a lot of people wanted to do just that, but we did as much as we could to keep the focus on the center and our customers.” To do that, Lattimer answered every letter of complaint with a handwritten note, returned every phone call (even from those who hadn’t left a number), granted interviews to every reporter (though she was careful not to let them shoot in front of the offending stores) and allowed shoppers to “vent” in the center’s offices.

“I believe every person who came to see us left with a positive feeling that we understood their concerns,” she said. “I’m a mother of a 13-year-old myself. It was important to show the people that we cared and that we realized this was a real, emotional event for many of them. We realize our customers are not just our guests, but ambassadors.”

Was Family First satisfied with South Pointe’s handling of the situation? “Absolutely not,” spokeswoman Jessica Moenning told SCT. “They said they were concerned. They appeared to be empathetic. But when it got right down to it, we felt both Red Development and South Pointe Pavilion had a responsibility to respond to our concerns and didn’t.”

According to Moenning, the group turned to the mall only after direct appeals to its retailers bore no fruit. Family First then offered to review South Pointe store leases with its attorneys to determine whether the mall’s assertion that its leases prohibited interfering with tenant advertising was justified. This request, said Lattimer, was denied on the basis that leases are private documents.

Some locals opposed the opening of this Victoria’s Secret on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

As for the tenants, Lattimer said, “I went as high up their corporate ladder as I could get just to let them know this was what we were dealing with.” At the same time, she knew that a positive relationship with the tenants was vital to her mall and its owners, and that it would take considerably more than an unhappy group in Nebraska to make them change their advertising strategy.

The retailers contacted by SCT say they expect their campaigns will generate complaints from time to time, but maintain they hear more positive feedback.

The photograph that caused the controversy in Lincoln’s Abercrombie store is a black-and-white fashion photo by noted commercial photographer Bruce Weber, who took several shots for the chain’s spring campaign.

“We think the photographs were very beautiful,” said Hampton Carney, a spokesman for the New Albany, Ohio-based retailer. “And our target customers — mainly 18-to-22-year-old college students — have reacted very positively to the campaign.” In general, the chain does not tailor its campaigns for particular markets, he says.

Anthony Hebron, a spokesman for Victoria’s Secret parent Limited Brands, Columbus, Ohio, says controversies such as those in Lincoln are “isolated events” that tend to die out when the chain changes its displays. In Lincoln, the Valentine’s Day window displays went down shortly after the holiday, says Lattimer.

Shopping centers generally prefer to leave decisions on visual merchandising to the experts: the retailers who create them.

“Big retailers are big retailers because they’ve done a good job of merchandising and display over the years,” said J. Scott Mumphrey, CSM, executive vice president of property management for Simon Property Group, Indianapolis, which is one of Abercrombie and Victoria’s Secret’s largest landlords. “They wouldn’t have been successful if they weren’t good at it.”

Like Lattimer, Mumphrey says being understanding with unhappy mall shoppers is the key. Simon urges its managers and marketers to hear out customers and explain what the center can and cannot do.

“While we’re in the position to take action against something that’s illegal, pornographic or vulgar, it’s not within our ability to start telling stores what they can or can’t do in the form of advertising,” Mumphrey said. “We are always willing to give them the telephone number of the store’s home office and let them express their feelings directly to them.”

He adds: “I’ve never had one of those phone calls end badly. I know people would prefer they not be exposed to things they don’t like, but it’s also what makes this country great.”

Observers say a more common problem is unkempt or sloppy store window displays, which often happens in smaller centers with local retailers that lack design expertise or big advertising budgets. Centers facing that issue should arrange to have a designer work with tenants, Ellis says.

Unlike concerns over racy designs, the issue of unkempt windows is one on which center managers have leases on their side.

“Like residential communities, we have pretty strict requirements in terms of how things are to be managed when they’re in the public view of the shopper,” said Mumphrey. “That’s for the protection of all of our retailers. You can’t have a guy doing a terrible job next to somebody doing a terrific job. So our leases are very specific as to how displays need to be displayed.”

Lattimer says she is not sure how much, if at all, the controversy in Lincoln this year affected sales and traffic at South Pointe. (A slowdown that month, she says, may also have been attributable to bad weather and a struggling economy.) But she is confident — for now — that the property came out of it intact.

“I think we were able to keep people shopping at South Pointe,” she said. “Whether they’re still Victoria’s Secret or Abercrombie shoppers, I can’t say.”

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