Back To School: A University Invites Marketing Guru Stanley Eichelbaum to Demonstrate That Those Who Can, Teach

Stanley L. Eichelbaum, SCMD, is taking a most personal stake in the future of retail real estate. Eichelbaum, who is president of Marketing Developments, a Cincinnati-based retail strategy firm, and an ICSC past trustee, is now a professor at Michigan State University, where he hopes to shape the next generation of industry leaders.

In June the university’s College of Communication Arts & Sciences hired Eichelbaum as director of international initiatives and professor of practice for a new program that combines advertising, public relations and retailing studies. This fall the Michigan State alumnus will teach a seminar for seniors and graduate students exploring the link between product, retail format and community. The college also tapped him to open a campus in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, next year. “Academia is the right place to be right now to explore the leading edges of this industry,” said Eichelbaum, who will commute to the university’s East Lansing campus from his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “For some strange reason, retailing hasn’t been seen as an active employer, when it’s the largest employment sector.”

Eichelbaum brings with him experience in developing retail throughout the world, including work in 45 countries, his peers say. “He will be a tremendous asset to our program,” said Richard Cole, professor and chairman of the department of advertising, public relations and retail at Michigan State. “Stan is extremely well known overseas, and he’s got a collaborative personality. Those are the two main things we look for when we hire.”

From major U.S. cities to South America to the Middle East, Eichelbaum has tackled many new frontiers. “I’ve lived a Forrest Gump kind of life,” he said. “I somehow end up involved in all kinds of great stuff.”

Eichelbaum, whose parents ran the famed Bagel Delicatessen, a Detroit haunt whose patrons included Milton Berle, Lenny Bruce, Marvin Gaye and Barbra Streisand. “Motown was right next door,” said Eichelbaum. He says the positive urban experiences of his childhood were a motivation for his efforts to re-energize cities through development. “I grew up in the greatest city in the world,” he said. “Detroit in the ’50s and ’60s was a place where a 5-year-old could walk around downtown all by himself. I was a kid in awe most of the time.”

That kid in awe came into the world in 1945 as the youngest of four boys born to Martin and Elizabeth Eichelbaum. He describes his family as being “incredibly tight-knit” and says his summer days were typically spent playing baseball from morning till night.

At 17 Eichelbaum left home for Michigan State, where he earned a degree in communications and advertising. Having worked for the university’s State News as an advertising manager and writer during that time, he stuck around for a year after graduating and continued working for the publication.

Following a brief sojourn in California, Eichelbaum returned to Michigan and joined the ad department of a suburban Detroit newspaper. Shortly thereafter he spent a year in Washington and in Erie, Pa., working for Volunteers in Service to America, or Vista, on low-income housing and city planning. Eichelbaum says he was initially attracted to the program as a commitment to alternative service during the Vietnam War, but he soon found urban development to be his calling.

“Vista was my first taste of planning and financing development, and I just loved the challenge,” said Eichelbaum. “I loved combining creativity with economics, and I discovered it was a way to really make people’s lives better.”

After a year with Vista, Eichelbaum joined The Rouse Co., which was, through a partnership with a London company, the largest developer and financier of low-income housing in the world at the time. During his nine years there, he was marketing director at two Ohio centers — Salem Mall, in Dayton, and Franklin Park, in Toledo — before relocating to the firm’s Columbia, Md., headquarters to serve as director of creative services.

In 1980 Eichelbaum left Rouse to join the team overseeing Federated Department Stores’ realty expansion program in Cincinnati. Eichelbaum remained at Federated for the next nine years, during which time JMB/Centers Management Co. acquired the chain. As executive vice president, he oversaw the marketing strategies and sales analyses for 23 projects.

Then Eichelbaum faced the tough decision of either moving to Chicago to stay on at JMB, or going his own way. He chose the latter, taking a handful of staff members with him to form Marketing Developments. Citing the need for research and marketing to be under one umbrella, Eichelbaum set out to create a company that specialized in evaluating property productivity and spotting trends through what he calls proactive trending research. By collecting feedback from consumers and retailers, Eichelbaum has set himself apart with an ability to make swift, effective changes, sources say.

“He’s the best person at getting feedback I’ve ever met,” said Pope Coleman, a member of the board of executives committee for the Over-the-Rhine Foundation, a nonprofit Cincinnati redevelopment organization where Eichelbaum volunteers. “He really listens to people, serves everyone and immediately corrects the course where changes need to be made. I wish we had more people like him in Washington.”

And perhaps in the world, his colleagues say. In addition to his work in the U.S., Eichelbaum has supervised the turnaround strategies of many properties overseas, including Al Ghurair Retail City, in Dubai; MetroCenter, in San Salvador, El Salvador; and Nova America, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where local developers had struggled for five years to build a center on a proposed space.

“The main problem was the site we had was only a mile from a large shopping center with great anchors and good management,” said Sergio Carvalho, chairman of Ancar, the Rio de Janeiro development and management firm that oversaw Nova America. “Stan came in and suggested we build a multiple-use center, and it’s been a tremendous success. He is far and away the best marketing consultant in the world.” Nova America now has a university with 8,000 students, as well as seven movie theaters, 155 offices and 110 shops.

“It’s the general consensus that Stan is the leading international expert in trends in retail markets here and abroad,” said Don Mazziotti, senior vice president of urban development at Harsch Investment Property, a real estate investment company based in Portland, Ore. Mazziotti was executive director of the Portland Development Commission from 2000 to 2005 and retained Eichelbaum to help shape the company’s retail strategy for four of those years.

During Eichelbaum’s time working with Mazziotti, he helped orchestrate the redesign of downtown Portland in a controlled manner, recruiting tenants to drive tourism at a pace the city’s economy could sustain. “Stan has an incredible sense of synergy between the public, transportation and housing as it relates to retail,” said Mazziotti. “Because of his work, downtown Portland is now one of the most vibrant and successful cities for its size and population in the U.S.”

Coleman says Eichelbaum has engineered similar feats in Cincinnati through his volunteer work at the Over-the-Rhine Foundation, which was established to help restore the 19th-century Italianate structures in the city’s oldest neighborhood —called Over-the-Rhine — which had fallen on hard times and turned into a bit of a slum, with a lot of nightclubs but not a lot of retail. The foundation sought Eichelbaum’s help three years ago. “We’d heard he’d had success with projects not just in the U.S. but also in South America and the Middle East,” Coleman said. “We figured that if he could get through to people in all those places, that he would certainly be able to help our community.”

Eichelbaum initiated a project called Markets on Main, a community street fair for local artists, craftsmen and street vendors. The idea was such a success that the city’s chamber of commerce turned it in to a regular event to be held the second Sunday of every month.

Similar outcomes can be achieved in blighted neighborhoods throughout the world, Eichelbaum says, but young and able minds are needed. “There is simply an insufficiency of leadership in the retail community,” he said, “and as issues of globalization continue to come up, there is a great opportunity right now for capable people to come right out of school and make an immediate impact."