Video courtesy Tampa Bay Business Committee for the Arts. Produced by Edit Suites.

Last week, Chicago-based marketing guru Patricia Martin landed in Tampa to talk about the ideas behind her new book, RenGen: The Rise of the Cultural Consumer and What It Means to Your Business.

Some of Martin’s rhetoric sounds familiar. Instead of a “creative class,” à la Richard Florida, she speaks glowingly of RenGen — short for Renaissance Generation — a multi-generational group of savvy cultural consumers who also constitute the country’s best chance for continued intellectual and economic relevance as workers. RenGen thrives on knowledge (”learn, baby, learn,” is their motto, she says), expects to collaborate in both the workplace and the marketplace, and loves to break the rules when the system is broken. RenGen’s ranks — a mash-up of Boomers, Xers and Gen Y — are filled with the mavens described in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point; their ideas and passions inspire a following.

Read the full story at Creative Loafing Tampa>>

I’d be curious to know what folks think about the idea that arts organizations are poised to thrive in an environment where corporations are eager to reach RenGen. Are there already Bay area businesses or arts organizations that are taking a RenGen approach to marketing? Who are they?

One example stands out in my mind: Florida Craftsmen Gallery, where executive director Maria Emilia has made a point of engaging local businesses in creative sponsorships of the gallery’s exhibitions– e.g., At Home With Crafts, an exhibit that incorporated collaborations with a real estate developer (Grady Pridgen), a real estate agent (Ann Rogers of Keller Williams), interior designers (Robb & Stucky), Youth Arts Corps, local artists (Lenn Neff, Mary Klein, Grace-Anne Alfiero and others) and a magazine publisher (Wendy Rosen of American Style) to transform the gallery into a model home stocked with crafts and host a series of events around the exhibit. Click here to read the story from Creative Loafing last year.

The Studio@620 also seems to do an excellent job of attracting corporate sponsors who want to reach their creative, multi-generational audience, though to my knowledge they do not collaboratively create programming with their sponsors.

Who else deserves credit for being ahead of the RenGen concept?

And, if you’re feeling brave, what can we do to get more businesses on board?