Strategies That Build Winning Brands

Timothy Calkins

Clinical Professor of Marketing, Kellogg School of Management

Tim Calkins helps people and organizations build strong brands. He is a marketing professor, author, speaker, and consultant. He teaches courses including Marketing Strategy and Biomedical Marketing, and is co-academic director of the Kellogg on Branding executive education program.

Tim has received numerous awards for his teaching. In 2018, he received the Top Professor Award from Germany’s Kellogg-WHU Executive MBA Program. He won the Lawrence G. Lavengood Outstanding Professor of the Year Award, the top teaching award at Kellogg, in 2013 and 2006, making him one of just five people in the award’s more than forty-year history to have won it twice. He also received the Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award, two Kellogg Faculty Impact Awards and the Kellogg Executive MBA Program’s Top Professor Award four times. Poets & Quants included him on its list “Favorite MBA Professors of 2016.”

He has written four books, the latest of which is How to Wash a Chicken – Mastering the Business Presentation (Page Two, 2018). He also wrote Defending Your Brand: How Smart Companies Use Defensive Strategy to Deal with Competitive Attacks (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Expert Marketer Magazine named Defending Your Brand the 2013 Marketing Book of the Year. Tim wrote Breakthrough Marketing Plans (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 and 2008) and was coeditor of Kellogg on Branding (John Wiley & Sons, 2005).

Tim manages Building Strong Brands, a blog on brand strategy. Inc. included the blog on its list of “Six Blogs That Can Teach You More Than an MBA.” He has published more than a dozen Kellogg case studies and has authored more than two dozen articles on marketing topics.

Tim is an expert on Super Bowl advertising. He created the Kellogg Super Bowl Advertising Review in 2005 and has led the event ever since. Over the past ten years, the program has generated more than five billion media impressions. He has served as a judge for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s WOMMY Awards, the Native Creatives Awards and the EthicMark Awards.

In addition to teaching at Kellogg, Tim works with major corporations around the world on strategy and branding issues. His recent clients include Pfizer, PepsiCo, Eli Lilly and AbbVie. He is managing director of Class 5 Consulting, a marketing strategy firm.

Tim is frequently cited by the media, having been quoted in publications including Business Week, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He has appeared on all of the major television networks.

Tim began his career at the consulting firm Booz Allen and Hamilton, where he worked on strategy projects. He joined the marketing team at Kraft Foods in 1991. During his almost 11 years at Kraft, he led brands including Miracle Whip, Taco Bell, Parkay and DiGiorno. He was responsible for the launch of more than two dozen new products.

Julie Hennessy

Clinical Professor of Marketing and Associate Chair of the Marketing Department

Professor Hennessy's MBA and Executive teaching focuses on the development of Marketing Strategies to enhance long-term competitive advantage and profitability. She works frequently with research and technology-driven firms that desire to become more customer-centric, in both new product/services and mature product/services categories. Recent executive teaching assignments have included work with Facebook, Hyatt, SC Johnson, Abbvie, Novartis, Nestle, McDonalds, Microsoft, ABInBev, John Deere, Kraft/Heinz, and Textron.

Professor Hennessy has been a regular recipient of teaching awards at the Kellogg School. In both 2017 and 2007, she received the Lawrence G. Lavengood Outstanding Professor of the Year Award, Kellogg's top award for teaching quality and impact, as voted by the Kellogg graduating class making her one of just five people in the award’s more than forty-year history to have won it twice. She had been a finalist (top 5 faculty members) in consideration for the Lavengood Award in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. Professor Hennessy has also been recognized by her academic department, winning the Marketing Department's Core Course Teaching award. She has also received seven special student impact awards.

Professor Hennessy's writing concentrates on cases for classroom use. Recent cases written include studies of Stella Artois in South Africa, Teach for India, Northwestern Memorial Hospital Hispanic Organ Transplant Program, Synthroid, TiVo, Apple iPod, Invisalign Orthodontics, and Biaxin and Zithromax in the antibiotics market.