She bet a 3,600-person retail empire on a simple idea: the mall never actually died. It just needed a better story - and a Simple Minds song.
For about a decade now, the retail obituary has been the easiest column in the business to write. Malls are dying. Anchor stores are closing. Gen Z lives on a phone. Lee Sterling has read every version of it, and she keeps landing on the same quiet objection: the numbers say otherwise. As Chief Marketing Officer of Simon Property Group, she is paid to notice that gap between the headline and the receipt - and to build campaigns inside it.
Simon is not a boutique. It is one of the largest owners of shopping destinations in the country, spanning traditional malls, the Mills, and Premium Outlets, with a workforce in the thousands and annual revenue north of six billion dollars. Sterling sits on top of the marketing engine for all three of those platforms. The job is not to sell one store. It is to sell the idea of the place itself.
"The mall is a touchstone of the American cultural experience - one with remarkable staying power."Lee Sterling
Sterling has spent close to 25 years inside the shopping-center world, which is unusual in an era when marketers change logos every 30 months. She started with roughly 15 years at Westfield, holding Vice President roles across both corporate and field marketing - the two halves of the business that rarely speak the same language. Corporate builds the brand from headquarters. Field marketing lives at the property, closer to the shopper and the tenant. She learned both dialects.
In 2013 she moved to Simon as Senior Vice President of Brand Management. The following year she led the company's brand relaunch, a full reset of how Simon presented itself. Then, in 2020, she left. She spent time in consumer products, including a stretch at Edgewell Personal Care working on digital and e-commerce content - the CPG side of the fence, where the product is a razor or a lotion and the shelf is somebody else's. In 2023 she came back to Simon, this time as its Chief Marketing Officer.
That loop matters. The detour into CPG gave her the e-commerce muscles that a pure real-estate marketer often lacks, and she brought them back to a company that owns physical space. The result is a marketer who is genuinely fluent on both sides of the online-versus-store argument, which turns out to be the whole point.
Ask most people to describe modern retail and they will hand you a cage match: e-commerce in one corner, brick-and-mortar in the other, one of them destined to win. Sterling does not buy the framing. Her read of the data is that shoppers are not choosing. They browse online and then show up in person. They do both, often in the same afternoon, and the brands that treat those as rival channels are fighting a war their own customers already ended.
"Today's customers are using online and in-person shopping together."Lee Sterling
So Simon built both front doors. ShopSimon is the digital marketplace, expanded and rebranded under her tenure into a storefront carrying sale merchandise from more than 360 retailers - a mall company running an online mall. Then there is the physical experience, which Sterling markets not as square footage but as something closer to a feeling: retail, dining, entertainment, and the specific pull of meeting people somewhere real.
The clearest expression of her thesis arrived in 2024 with a campaign called "Meet Me @themall." On paper it looks like a risk. It leans on 1980s and 1990s nostalgia - it even reworks a classic Simple Minds song - and points all of that squarely at Gen Z, a generation that was not alive for any of it. Nostalgia is supposed to work on the people who lived through it. Sterling ran it the other way.
The bet was built on an insight the culture had been slow to accept: Gen Z is not fleeing the mall. They are showing up in person, treating it as a place to shop, eat, hang out and be seen - much like their parents did. The campaign's job was simply to say that out loud, loudly, and to invite them back to a place many of them had never actually left.
The distribution matched the ambition. The spots ran across Netflix, Peacock, Hulu and Disney+, then spilled onto Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, into Simon's own channels, and into the shopping centers themselves. Simon spun up dedicated @themall accounts on TikTok and Instagram as their own social identity, separate from the corporate brand. More than 250 creators were pulled in. The films were made with SuperBloom House and directed by Matty Peacock, whose reel includes Billie Eilish, Cardi B and Demi Lovato.
"At Simon, we are all about bringing multiple generations together to seek new connections, have fun and make shared memories along the way."Lee Sterling
When Sterling explains what she actually does, she keeps returning to one word. "With a diverse portfolio of assets, the key to our marketing is storytelling," she has said, "and amplifying our story to drive traffic and sales." It is a tidy summary of a specific belief: that a mall does not compete on floor plans or parking counts, but on the memories it can manufacture. First jobs. First dates. An afternoon of freedom with twenty dollars and nowhere to be.
That is a harder thing to sell than a discount, because it is emotional and slow. It also happens to be the one thing an app cannot ship to your door. Sterling's whole strategy is a wager that the feeling of a place - the reason two generations will agree to meet there - is durable enough to build a brand on, even as the tools for reaching people change every year.
She has done a version of this before. The 2014 relaunch was her first Simon reset. A decade later, "Meet Me @themall" is the encore, aimed at a generation that had aged into the store since the first act. The mediums are new - streaming slots, creator armies, a purpose-built social handle. The underlying idea is stubbornly the same one she started with.