1963

555 Fifth Avenue, Ninth Floor New York, NY 10017

Our complex times demand greater understanding and knowledge of consumer behavior on the part of business. AlanFlaschner and Sam Barton might agree.

Alan, a marketing professor at the University of Toledo, has been named director of UT's Business Research Center in the College of Business Administration. Sam is president of Claritas Corporation, Alexandria, Va., whose specialty in geodemography was profiled on page one of the Wall Street Journal.

Alan's Business Research Center is a clearing house for UT professors performing client and academic research. It also publishes Ohio Economy. A current project is to measure unemployment and underemployment, as well as to evaluate employment opportunities in Ohio. The center is also performing research for the Toledo Visitors and Convention Bureau and the Collingwood Springs Redevelopment Corporation, a six-block neighborhood in the Ashland and Bancroft Street area of Toledo.

An experienced market researcher, Alan recently studied the conflict between manufacturers and retailers of microcomputers for business in Silicon Valley, San Jose, Calif. He found a gulf in the perceptions of what customers want and what manufacturers are making. Alan said his preliminary findings indicate that manufacturers aren't offering enough profit margin to allow the dealers to give the customer assistance with hardware and software. "The hardware manufacturers make the dealers act like cash-and-carry supermarkets, , which is the opposite of what users want."

Author of two textbooks, Retailing (Winthrop, 1981) and Marketing Research (MacMillan, 1983), Alan finished up his B.A. in psychology at the University of Maine, M.A. in sociology at Emory University, and Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina. Before joining UT, he taught at the University of Georgia, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina.

Sam Barton's Claritas, according to the Wall Street Journal, created the computerized PRIZM target marketing system that divides the 240,000 U.S. neighborhoods into 40 different prototypes "and can often with amazing accuracy describe the life in each from the type of aspirin in the medicine cabinet to the magazines on the coffee table." The company's clients range from Coca-Cola Company, and General Motors Corporation to evangelist groups. GM, for example, used Claritas in its successful launch of the 1985 Buick Electra, a shorter, more svelte model than the 1984 version, in suburban upscale neighborhoods. Not long ago, Claritas was bought out by VNU, its parent company, a multinational publishing company based in the Netherlands, according to DM News, a direct marketing newspaper. Sam told the paper that the buyout will help facilitate investments in several PRIZM programs and in other areas.

Selling products directly to the elderly and disabled in their homes is Tom Chandler of Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. He runs Freedom Technology, a new venture of Sunrise Medical. Maybe you saw Francie, Tom's wife, daughters Ashley, seven, and Alissa, five, or dog, Quincy, in one of his commercials for a lift chair or Trooper scooter. Two other children, Kim, 21, and Tom, 18, are in college at Arizona State and San Diego State.

Lou Gerstner, whose marketing prowess as head of American Express is legend, became a member of the board of directors of the New York Times Company. And Bill Adelaar has started W.R. Adelaar and Company, a management consulting firm, following the licensing of Adelaar Bros., Inc., a family textile business in New York to a third party with access to non-union production.

Ed Wirth is now in Morristown, N.J., as direct manager of strategic planning at AT&T. He earned a Ph.D. last year in social change at Walden University. His dissertation title is The Impact of TransferPricing on EDP Productivity, A Study in Social Change. John Farnsworth runs the U.S. Private Banking Group for the Bank of America in San Francisco, an 18-office group catering exclusively to people who earn $3-million and up. Bruce Deery won the "Rookie of the Year" award in his first year with Merrill Lynch in Florida, specializing in waterfront and investment property. He has three sons, Tod, an engineering student at University of New Hampshire; Scott, a freshman at Eckerd College, St. Petersburgh, Fla.; and Cam, a high school student in Sarasota.

Dave Cook is starting a restaurant and perhaps a winery in Tucson, Ariz., and Sam Cabot's paint company, Cabot's Stains, has moved into a new building on 28 acres in Newburyport, Mass. Governor Dukakis even signed the first gallon of paint off of the new production line.

Colgate Palmolive Company has made Steve Lister a general manager in Lisbon, Portugal, and Ash Hartwell is in Botswana trying to improve the expanding secondary school system there. JohnChamberlin, who made our lost addresses list last month, has been found ... in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, where he is a political officer at the U.S. Embassy.

Hank Rodgers, Springfield, Mass., travels throughout New England selling to the ski industry, and Steve Pennypacker has started a new business in a 1710 farmhouse in Valley Forge, Pa. DickFriedman is a hotel builder based in Boston whose recent achievements are the Charles Hotel at Harvard University and the Hyatt Regency at Princeton.

Bill Adclaar '63, right, shakes hands with fellowclimber Victor Hamilton on the summit of Mt.Hood in Oregon following a successful threeparty winter assault. Bill trained for the climbat the Eastern Mountain Sports Climbing Schoolin North Conway, N.H.