STRONGBRANDS    Professor Tim Calkins, Kellogg School of Management

I’ve been teaching at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management for more than 20 years. During that time, I’ve taught the Marketing Strategy for Growth and Defense course every year. By this point, I have completed more than 100 sections and taught over 10,000 students. I created the Biomedical Marketing course more than a decade ago and have taught that class more than 25 times.

This week is the first class of my new course: Influencer Marketing. Creating a new course is a very different challenge.

The Challenge

Most of the time, instructors are teaching familiar material. Perhaps they’ve taught the class before, like my experience in Marketing Strategy. If not, there usually is an existing course design. We have a new instructor teaching Marketing Management this fall at Kellogg; he is following the established course flow and teaching the same cases.

A new class? That is a completely different endeavor.

Start with a basic question: what should the course cover? That isn’t a simple question, especially when the topic is influencer marketing, a completely new space.

Then there is a design question. Which topics come first? What is the flow?

Then there are questions about examples, cases and exercises. How many slides do we need on a topic? What are the interesting topics for a class discussion? How do we engage students?

The entire venture is somewhat unknown. How long will a particular topic take? Is this block of material likely to take ten minutes? Or twenty? If it runs short, the class might end early and that isn’t ideal. If it goes long, then the end of the class will be a scramble and that also isn’t good.

Influencer Marketing

My first step when considering the Influencer Marketing course was to get some help. Linda Kim, a former student and digital marketing leader at lululemon recently taught in my Marketing Strategy course and was terrific. She was willing to partner with me on the class.

Then came the process of learning about the topic. What is happening today in the world of influencer marketing? We did a series of interviews with brand leaders and influencer firms and read a lot of white papers and research studies.

From there, we sat down to design the overall flow. The course goes like this:

Week 1 is an introduction to the topic: why is it so important and growing so fast?

Week 2 gets into the brand decision. When should a business consider an influencer program? Are real influencers the best way to go, or virtual influencers?

Week 3 will cover different ways of working with influencers.

Week 4 walks through the process. What happens first? This class gets into all the complicated steps in the process: the brief, approvals, measurement.

Then week 5 focuses on the risks: what can go wrong?

After getting the flow, we shifted to the next question: case studies and guests. What case studies will add to the discussion? Who could be our guest speakers?

Finally, it was time to construct the content, which includes developing pages and finding materials.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to teach the topic in a few different executive sessions. This was enormously valuable; I could figure out where students were interested and how the materials flowed. In one section, I realized it was too much talking and not enough class interaction. I redesigned that section.

First Week

The class kicks off this week. We have a full class of 70 with a waitlist, so the topic is appealing. That is a start. I’ll keep you posted on how things work out.

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