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MAXI Preview

Gauging success

By Debra Hazel

It's fixed.
They reward all their friends.
My company will never win as long as XXX is in charge.

All the above are assumptions and statements made at some point by someone about the MAXIs, ICSC's awards program to honor outstanding achievement in shopping center marketing and management. And all of them are wrong.

In reality, the process of selecting the MAXIs is anonymous and strictly numbers-based. The group of 33 shopping center marketing and management professionals that gathered in Minneapolis in June to judge the 29th MAXIs' 452 entries still don't know the winners.

Judges do not talk over the winners, passing around the massive binders containing the entries, rewarding friends and colleagues as they see fit.

Instead, the judges are instructed to hold entries to the highest possible standard.

"MAXI is an education program. This cannot be an exercise in self-congratulation," said Mary Kiley, SCMD, senior vice president of marketing at Chicago-based General Growth Properties and this year's MAXI chairperson, during a pre-judging orientation.

The judging room was set up much like a classroom, with individual "desks." Tables lining the periphery of the room held the black binders containing the MAXI entries. Televisions with VCRs were placed around the room to allow judges to view submitted videos of entries.

Judges cannot examine books from their own company, and are asked to disqualify themselves from judging work by friends and/or close colleagues.

Each entry was judged five times on five categories: objectives and strategy; creativity; implementation; cost effectiveness; and results and impact. Judges were selected randomly: Temporary assistants not connected to the industry distributed the binders to judges, who checked to make sure they were not disqualified from judging the entry. If they did see a conflict, the assistant took the book away and placed it on another available desk.

Using pencil on a scannable form, judges ranked each category from 1 to 10. They also entered a PIN number that allowed ICSC to confirm that they had not judged an entrant improperly. Once a judge finished with an entry, the form was brought to the front of the room, and the book given to another judge. After five judges had scored the entry, it was "retired."

The only exception to the system is the Center Productivity category, now in its second year. That category, which assesses programs that had a direct and measurable impact on a center's revenue performance and/or operational efficiency, was judged by past MAXI chairs only.

"Center productivity is really tough to judge, and the past chairmen have the experience and broader business experience [to do so]," Kiley said. "Any time there's a new category, it takes time for people to understand it."

Determining the awards then became a matter of simple math. JoAnn Laut, ICSC's senior manager of professional recognition, scanned in the results for each entry. The highest and lowest scores in each category were eliminated. The three remaining scores in each category were then averaged. Lastly, the averages were added for the final score.

Entries must earn at least 40 points for a MAXI, 35 points for a MAXI Merit. However, only one MAXI per category may be awarded; thus, if one program earns 50 points and another 48 points, the latter program will be awarded a MAXI Merit. More than one MAXI is awarded only in the event of a tie.

Challenges

For some, remaining true to a standard was a significant challenge.

In previous years, deciding what constitutes a "10" vs., say, an "8" in scoring was pretty much up to the individual scorer. It was a challenge to remain consistent from entry to entry, many admitted.

Helping this year was a guideline created by two-time MAXI chairperson William Fullington, SCMD, which gave clear suggestions on what a "10" entry should be: fairly close to perfect. A "7," the guide suggested, should be good, with only a few flaws. A "1" has many serious problems.

Still, standards, and the entries themselves, have changed.

A judge since 1992 and the chairperson of the 1998 Maple Leaf awards (the Canadian version of MAXI), Margaret Dickson, SCMD, of Scarborough, Ontario-based Dickson Marketing Group has seen her own standards of what makes a winner change.

"If you're going to do something that is not new, you have to make it sparkle. We look for that spark that makes you go 'Wow!'," she said.

The entries have become more believable, noted Alberta Davidson, SCMD, senior vice president of marketing for TrizecHahn, San Diego, and last year's MAXI chair. "They're more thought out in advance, from marketing to strategic objectives, and being able to match the results. There's a lot less emphasis on pretty pictures."

The increasing quantifying of results has been a welcome change, added Cheri A. Morris, SCMD, president of Morris & Fellows, Atlanta. "We're seeing the science of marketing improve radically. But we might have lost some of the art."

But the goals of MAXI judging really haven't changed much.

"My hope is that we can get the owners to appreciate marketing, the better exposure our efforts give to our centers, and the increase in center productivity," Davidson said.

It's safe to say that in the moments before the MAXI Award winners are announced, there will be a great deal of anxiety in the air.

After all, winning a MAXI, which sets the bar for marketing excellence, can be a defining moment in a marketing director's career.

But for many developers, the moment will also be a culmination of a year's worth of hard work and detailed coordination. Winners will be announced Sept. 26, at ICSC's Fall Management and Marketing Conference in Denver.

For one company, Santa Monica, Calif.-based developer The Macerich Co., it will signal the end of a process that began late last year, when marketing officials first sat down in a regional meeting to go over their MAXI game plan.

"We brought in all six of our regional marketing directors to look at what we've accomplished over the last year, and to go over what we would consider to be possible entries," said Susan Valentine, SCMD, the company's senior vice president of marketing.

After narrowing the list down one by one, the regional directors were instructed to work with their individual marketing directors, to make sure they understood the process, she said.

Depending on the experience level of the local marketing director, each entry can take weeks to put together. Many hire professional photographers and writers, she said.

"After that, the entries are generated by the individual marketing directors," she explained. "Preliminary entries then go up through the regional directors, who read them and forward them to me. I go through them one last time before sending them back to the marketing directors so they can put the whole package together," Valentine said.

After submitting only four entries last year, Macerich officials entered 30 this year, an increase Valentine attributes to both an enhanced emphasis on marketing and the fact that the company has tripled in size over the last two years (over the past 18 months the company has acquired 17 centers).

With such a high number of entries, however, coordination was critical.

Knowing that each entry requires a corporate signature, Valentine set up shop near a fax machine at one of Macerich's nearby malls in the final days before entries were due in June.

"I wanted to start early enough so we weren't doing everything at the last minute," she said. "This is actually the first year that some entries actually did go out a few weeks in advance."

That said, Valentine admitted that a few of the entries barely made the deadline.

"I'd say probably about four of the 30 entries went directly to the airport because we missed the FedEx delivery man," she said, noting that the last-minute scramble is somewhat of a MAXI tradition for marketing directors.

Valentine has witnessed a few MAXI "war stories" over the years, such as one nervous marketing director who finally found a delivery service that would deliver the entry the same day.

"No matter what you do, there will always be a few entries that barely make it and even some that don't," she explained. "It's very important for marketing people to get it out on time after they've worked so hard on it."

Phoenix-based Westcor Partners takes a slightly different approach in preparing MAXI entries, according to Veronica Lovesy, SCMD, the company's regional marketing director.

Six weeks before the entries are mailed, all eight of the company's marketing directors take part in a mock MAXI judging.

"We basically get together and read each other's entries, then rate them using a score sheet similar to the ones the judges use," she explained.

Each of the entries, she added, are read and commented on by at least five different marketing directors.

This year Westcor submitted five entries, which were chosen primarily based on sales results.

"We're fortunate that all of our malls are on daily sales [a software program which gathers retail sales], which allows us to set pretty specific objectives that we can measure," Lovesy explained.

Similar to Macerich's system, Westcor's marketing directors are also asked to submit a one-page rough draft summary months ahead of the due date.

Last year, Lovesy was designated by ICSC to accept the entries on deadline day, which gave her a whole new perspective on the process.

"I would say out of 400 entries, 80% came in over the last two days," she said. "Sometimes people try to do too many, so you really have to decide what makes the most sense."

Another developer, Newport Beach, Calif.-based Donahue Schriber, requires marketing directors to submit rough drafts in April, according to Judi A. Lapin, SCMD, senior vice president of marketing and communications.

"That's our opportunity to look at the entries objectively, and it's when we decide whether they are worthy of submission," she said.

The company also uses its corporate marketing calendar to remind people when they should be getting their books and entries in order, she added.

Many marketing directors, Lapin added, end up waiting too long to work on their entries.

"One of the most unfortunate things is when people put months of hard work into it and then wait until the last minute to do the entry," she said. "I know of some phenomenal entries people literally had to bail on because they just didn't allow enough time."

Even winning, she said, could never surpass the feeling of relief and accomplishment of getting those entries in the FedEx box, even if it happens to be at the local airport.

"It's great to win but the real celebration in our office comes when the entries finally go out," she said. "We've literally popped champagne because it's almost like a victory in itself."