Marketing Developments: Article: Shopping Savant

The Business Courier

Marketing Developments was recently profiled in Cincinnati’s weekly business news magazine, the Business Courier.

Shopping Savant: Stan Eichelbaum is one of the world’s top retail experts

by Lucy May, Courier Staff Reporter

From his modest offices at Fourth and Plum streets downtown, Stan Eichelbaum has breathed new life into the oldest shopping center in Central America. He has planned a dramatic retail city in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. And he has helped the city of Pittsburgh reclaim its riverfront for a 34-acre mixed-use development.

But despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in retail projects his company, Marketing Developments Inc., has touched over the past 12 years, Eichelbaum argues there’s too much retail in the United States.

“There’s enough retail in this country to serve 700 million people, and we only have about 285 million,” Eichelbaum said, citing a lack of discipline as the problem. “There’s no industry in the history of the world that has accumulated more wealth with less maturity than the development industry.”

Marketing Developments advises against building a retail project as often as it gives developers the go-ahead. And it’s that kind of straight talk and focus on research that has made Eichelbaum’s six-person firm one of the most respected retail and development consulting firms in the country.

In addition to preparing marketing strategies and materials that help cities sell themselves to retailers, Eichelbaum’s firm does extensive research to help investors and developers determine what kinds of projects will work in different locations. The firm studies surrounding retail and development, demographics and trends to determine whether a project can sustain itself for the long term.

Banks look to Marketing Developments as a rare consulting firm that hits the mark.

“Stan has managed through hard work and business savvy to become the leading retail consultant in the country,” said Don Mazziotti, executive director of the Portland Development Commission in Oregon, which hired Eichelbaum to help strengthen its downtown retail. “We're interested in hiring the best. Stan was our first choice.”

"We are constantly monitoring economic trending with the belief that he that controls the information controls the world,” said Stan Eichelbaum, owner of downtown-based Marketing Developments.

Those who work with Eichelbaum say what sets him apart is his contacts. Eichelbaum said his firm has 90,000 slides illustrating different types of retailers and developments around the world and what he thinks is the world’s largest retailer database.

That’s only impressive, he said, because he and his staff have personal knowledge of a great share of those companies' performance, constraints and leadership.

Eichelbaum said he has made so many contacts by teaching development courses at universities around the world, sitting on the board of the International Council of Shopping Centers and judging U.S. and European development marketing competitions.

“Plus, we monitor,'' he said. “We are constantly monitoring economic trending with the belief that he who controls information controls the world.”

All that stems from a passion for retail, said David Ginsburg, executive vice president of Downtown Cincinnati Inc.

“He’s been in and around it for most of his adult life, and he knows just about everyone there is to know,” Ginsburg said.

That’s sure to keep Eichelbaum busy at this weekend’s International Council of Shopping Centers' annual meeting in Las Vegas. Expected to draw more than 30,000, the meeting is the largest retail and development gathering in the world.

There, Eichelbaum will introduce clients to retail executives. Marketing Developments also has designed more than 20,000 square feet of exhibit and booth space for the meeting, encompassing 60 different meeting rooms, all with computer hook-ups.

For Portland, Eichelbaum developed a marketing strategy so the city can appeal to retailers and hit their hot buttons, Mazziotti said, in addition to scheduling 30 meetings with top retail executives from around the world.

“They have a perspective that spans the globe. We're not interested in the same old thing,” Mazziotti said.

And Eichelbaum is known for using research to approach problems in unusual ways.

For example, his plan for revitalizing Al Ghurair Retail City in Dubai took into account the fact that two-thirds of the population were Indians brought in as a work force who preferred a lower-priced food court in the retail center. But in less than 10 years, the Arabic population will displace many of those Indian workers, and the Arabs prefer sit-down restaurants. His design for the center has built-in flexibility so the food court can be shifted to sit-down restaurants in the coming years.

But while Eichelbaum has logged about 4 million frequent-flier miles on Delta and another 2 million on American working with clients around the globe, he spends an incredible amount of time working on downtown Cincinnati, said Ginsburg.

“You'd almost think he was a full-time employee of DCI,” Ginsburg said of the time Eichelbaum spends on downtown as chairman of DCI’s retail and development committee and a member of its executive committee.

“I hope people are listening,'' said John Boorn, chairman and CEO of the Madison Marquette development firm who has known Eichelbaum for years.

Eichelbaum characterizes the Tri-State as having “incredible volatility” in the retail scene, with four major centers being developed outside Interstate 275, the retail center being developed in Oakleyand tenants being added to Newport on the Levee, among other projects.

For the region -- especially downtown -- to come out ahead, planning officials will have to look at the big picture when considering new developments and their tenant mix, he said, and city governments must be willing to invest money and staff to follow through.

“The issue is to explain to the investor in the right way how vital downtown Cincinnati is to the region,'' he said. “We have no other walk-around environment of this size in this region -- this is what America is about today.”

Perhaps what most sets Eichelbaum apart is the fact that he looks not only at whether a developer has the money to build a retail center but also whether retailers can actually make money once the development is built.

While that might sound obvious, overlooking that broader context has led to the overbuilding of U.S. retail, he said.

“For developers, the only thing that makes money is a shovel in the ground,” Eichelbaum said. “America has always been called the throwaway society. We've traded urban development for suburban development the same way. We've got to learn.”

Now, the development industry is being forced to become more disciplined, he said, with so-called smart-growth strategies controlling the way retail developments are built.

“It all comes down to two words: Make sense,'' Eichelbaum said, adding that every project must make developer sense, operational sense, consumer sense, community sense, economic sense and tenant sense.

“Smart growth has got to be met with smart development,” he said.