At the end of every weekend, Leora Halpern Lanz leaves her Huntington home for New York City, where she boards an Amtrak train to Boston. There, she teaches during the week at Boston University, where she is an associate professor at the college’s School of Hospitality. At the end, she comes home.
She has been commuting this way for 10 years.
Is she tired? No way! In fact, Lanz, 61, has just published her first book, “Developing Your Marketing Mindset: Real World Lessons from Hospitality,” now available on Amazon, and she is planning a second book to be released this coming winter.
Traveling back and forth from her home to Boston every week does not bother Lanz, who did a lot of flying around the country and the world during her three-decade career in the marketing world. The Press caught up with Lanz on a rare day off earlier this fall at the new Barnes & Noble store in Huntington, where she recently gave a reading of her book.
“I had a long career in marketing,” Lanz told the Press in an interview over coffee at the store’s cafe. “That made me comfortable to teach and write this book.”
“I call this a business book with a heart,” she said.
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Lanz, born and raised in Jamaica, Queens, is very much a professor, speaking in whole, carefully edited sentences that always answer whatever question is tossed her way.
Lanz studied communications at Cornell University in Ithaca, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree, and had the idea of becoming a broadcast journalist after years of watching Barbara Walters and Katie Couric. And even before college, Lanz said, she carefully kept journals of her daily activities, beginning when she was 13 years old.
“It was a way of keeping track of my babysitting jobs,” she said with a smile.
But a college professor, Peter Yesawich, a marketing guru with a national reputation, inspired Lanz to enter the field.
“I got introduced to an industry,” through Yesawich, Lanz said. “It regenerated me. It involved critical thinking. I talk about that in all of my classes.”
She earned a master’s degree at Boston University. Her classes, and her book, involve a lot of give-and-take with her students. She offers challenges as to how to market a hotel, or restaurant, and they must come up with solutions.
One mantra Lanz pushes often: “Think like a marketer; act like an owner.” In other words, you need to attract customers to make a sale, but you also need to watch the bottom line.
Lanz spent two years writing her book, most of the work taking place in the backyard of her Huntington home. But much of her life has been on the go.
During high school, she worked a summer job at Beefsteak Charlie’s, a well-known New York restaurant that has since closed but whose marketing concept emphasized an “all-you-can-eat” salad bar. At Cornell, Lanz worked at the college restaurant, all four years she attended the school.
Her marketing career was lengthy. For 15 years, she was global director of marketing and communications for HVS, a hospitality consulting firm then in Mineola. Prior to that, she worked for ten years as director of public relations and advertising for the ITT Sheraton Hotels of New York. She ran six hotels for Sheraton and played a key PR role for the hotels during the 1992 Democratic Convention, the year Bill Clinton was nominated for president.
She had also worked, for five years, as public relations director for the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau, now Meet Boston.
Marketing may seem like little more than a bunch of data and unfamiliar terms to many people. Lenz says otherwise, and that her book can be helpful to people who are not in the field.
She is big on companies that give back to the community, through donations with the environmentally-minded products they make, such as a food service company in Boston that features farm-to-table produce.
“It’s not just about selling,” Lenz said. “I teach my students that marketing means making connections. It all has to be done with caring.”
