Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
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at shopping centers, is designed for adaptability. "We have changed the program again and again as the world around us changes," Heinemann said. Sandra Oertel is one who came through the ECE training program. Today she is manager of Megalò Centro Commerciale, an ECE-operated center in Chieti, a provincial city in southeast Italy. Some things about her job have changed since she graduated 12 years ago, she acknowledges, and other things have not. "I think the main objective of every center manager is to satisfy three groups of stakeholders: the customers, the tenants and the investors," Oertel said. "That hasn't changed at all. What's changed are the ways and means to achieve this aim." Then, too, she says, people can keep closer tabs on a shop- ping center today than ever. "Everybody is better informed about everything now," she said. This may be especially true with respect to consumers. "When I had just started, we had our center newspaper, and we had the radio," Oertel said. The number of com- munication channels has multiplied, of course. "It's getting more difficult to keep an eye on every channel." But she does have some interesting new marketing assistants to help: hundreds of Megalò's customers. "We want to influence our marketing, but it is now more and more in the hands of the customers," she said. "They are becoming not just a passive re- cipient, but a really active element of our marketing." This is no hyperbole: Mega- lò's Facebook page displays some 3,400 reviews from customers who are hardly shy about telling ECE and each other what they think. "They are contributing to our work and even helping us do our work even better," she said. For Oertel, being a manager has meant a career of constant learning. A German native, she had to pick up Ital- ian when she took her current post. She has also spent a lot of time getting to know the people in the region, to get ideas about what kinds of stores they would like to see. In the future, managers will need to focus on two subjects: logistics and technology, according to Damian Har- rington, a Helsinki, Finland–based retail analyst at Colliers International. Logistics is becoming increasingly im- portant, because so many retailers are adopting an omni-channel marketing model. As online and offline retail blends, understanding how to accom- modate more-frequent deliveries will be crucial. "I think there needs to be a greater understanding of how logis- tics ties into a retailer's business, and can help drive revenue and profit- ability as the retail/logistics balance becomes increasingly tied together," he said. On the tech side, RFID (radio- f r e q u e n c y i d e n t i f i c a t i o n ) a n d 42 S C T / M a r c h 2 0 1 5 R o b e R t H e i n e m a n n , s e n i o R d i R e c t o R o f c e n t e R m a n a g e m e n t f o R H a m b u R g , g e R m a n y – b a s e d e c e , f o R H ' a p p l i c a n t s w H e n H i R i n g m a n a g e R s . "The main objective of every center manager is to satisfy three groups of stakeholders: the customers, the tenants and the investors."