About
Tim Calkins helps people build strong brands.
Tim is a marketing professor, author, speaker and consultant.
He is Associate Chair of the Marketing Department and Clinical Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, where he teaches courses including Marketing Strategy, Biomedical Marketing and Strategic Marketing Decisions. He is also co-academic director of the Kellogg on Branding executive education program.
Teaching Awards
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 2006 and 2013, making him one of just six people in the award’s more than forty-year history to have won it twice. In addition, he 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.”
Publications
His newest book is a guide to creating and delivering powerful business presentations. It is titled How to Wash a Chicken: Master the Business Presentation. You can read more about the book here.
In addition to How to Wash a Chicken, Tim is the author of 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. He also wrote Breakthrough Marketing Plans (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 and 2012). He is co-editor of Kellogg on Branding (John Wiley & Sons, 2005) and Kellogg on Branding in a Hyper-Connected World (John Wiley & Sons, 2019).
Tim’s blog on brand strategy, Building Strong Brands, was included on Inc‘s list of “Six Blogs That Can Teach You More Than an MBA.”
He has published more than a dozen Kellogg case studies including Crestor, MedImmune: FluMist Introduction and Genzyme: the Synvisc-One Investment Decision. He has authored more than two dozen articles on marketing topics.
Activities
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.
In addition to teaching at Kellogg, Tim works with major corporations around the world on strategy and branding issues. His recent clients include Eli Lilly, Bayer, Medtronic and AbbVie. He is managing director of Class 5 Consulting, a marketing strategy firm.
Tim is frequently cited by the media. He has been quoted in publications including Business Week, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and has appeared on all of the major television networks.
He serves on the board of the Alliance Française de Chicago and completed two terms on the board of the Lycée Français, Chicago’s French-International School.
Background
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.
He received his BA from Yale and his MBA from Harvard. Tim lives in Chicago with his wife and three children, and no chickens.
Recent comments