• Functional marketing leaders looking to get exposure to the broader marketing organization and looking to enhance their leadership, influence, team-building skills and mastery of marketing techniques beyond their area of specialization.
• Mid-career marketers with expertise and experience in a specific area of marketing. This program is also ideal for an individual contributor or someone who leads a small functional team. This marketer aims to get exposure to broader functional areas within marketing and master the current marketing techniques and platforms.

• Explore critical leadership skills to more effectively develop your team, build your influence, and shape your career
• Learn how to harness the power of your brands to offer a distinct customer advantage
• Implement agile marketing process and tools for your organization
• Use tools of automation and AI to market more efficiently
• Establish product leadership in your market segment
• Improve your strategic decision-making and problem-solving skills
• Develop winning customer experiences across your product portfolio
• Identify and target the right customers for the greatest value through differentiation

Module 1: Customer Centricity & Customer Value

As the program begins, you will analyze a business from a customer-centric viewpoint and examine the steps to developing a customer strategy. Also, you will learn to determine two key business metrics.

Module 2: Competitive Marketing Strategy

In little more than the last 10 years, Apple, Amazon, Starbucks, and many others have demonstrated the power of a new approach to marketing: innovate and deliver products and services to consumers that they simply could not imagine possible. You will examine this new marketing technique and explore how firms use innovation as well as marketing strategy to shape consumer learning and, in the process, produce remarkable success that is difficult to imitate.

Module 3: Marketing in a Digital World

The widespread availability of data, digital technologies, and optimization strategies have necessitated a holistic change in the way marketers understand, reach, attract, convert, and engage their customers. You will learn how marketing is being transformed in five disciplines.

Module 4: Agile Marketing

Here, you will focus on the process and execution-based aspects of modern marketing.

Module 5: Career Success Factors & Derailers

In this module, you will learn about the key career derailers that stall the progress of talented managers and leaders and explore the individual and organizational remedies to help mitigate the likelihood of derailment in your own career. You will also examine the traits and behaviors of high potential, high performers to understand why they don’t derail as frequently.

Module 6: Motivational Consumer Insight

In this module, you will learn to better understand your customers to stay three steps ahead of them – and the competition.

Module 7: Behavioral Marketing

Explore data-driven techniques used by modern marketers in understanding their customers. You will investigate the applications of automated behavioral marketing and platforms for mapping strategies to customer intent and marketing in real-time to "a segment of one."

Module 8: Leading with Analytics

Analytics is every leader’s problem. It requires investments in people, integrated data, analytics tools and organizational structure. From this module, you will understand the importance of planning for analytics, explain why analytics requires managerial judgment, and realize that analytics is at its core a thinking skill.

Module 9: Data Visualization

Using visualization to understand data requires you to understand the power of the human visual system to process data in a visualized form. Visualization allows analysts to see more complex patterns in their data and understand the perceptual building blocks of visualizations through precision. In this module, we will discuss the visualization skills needed to help you identify and communicate data more clearly.

Module 10: How to Tell Good from Bad Analytics

In this module, you will learn how to identify which kinds of analytics can (and cannot) be used to conclude that a business initiative is effective. This module offers a practical and accessible checklist and gives participants ample opportunity to apply these tools to real-life business examples.

Module 11: Marketing Automation & Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

This week you will focus on the automated and AI-delivered applications driving modern marketing. Also, you will learn to employ marketing automation and AI applications to accomplish with customers.

Module 12: Marketing Technology – Tough Challenges, Rich Choices

In this module, you will learn strategies and skills that will help you understand how technology can be utilized to improve various business processes and enhance your team's performance. Through a strong understanding of the marketing technology landscape, you will equip yourself with the knowledge and framework to be able to select marketing technologies, implement marketing technologies, and leverage marketing technologies.

Module 13: Strategy of Influence

How can you exert leadership when you lack formal authority? This module provides research-based, practical insights into how to influence individuals and groups without relying on forced compliance. You will examine psychological and behavioral factors that motivate people to respond favorably to your ideas while exploring practical strategies for structuring social interactions to gain influence and persuade others to change.

Module 14: Defining Your Brand

After establishing what defines a brand, you will explore how a brand adds value and how a brand can help or hurt a product proposition. Additionally, you will evaluate touchpoints for your brand and determine how to strengthen them.

Module 15: Brand Design & Touchpoints

To help a company build its business with users, you will identify key elements.

Module 16: Content Marketing

This week, you will map the customer experience and align content strategy and innovations with customer intent along with evaluating a content hub.

Module 17: Media Planning

Marketers scramble to keep up with shifts in advertising and their attention drifts toward tactical decisions – away from strategy. Brands clutter the touchpoints, channels, and social feeds of customers with more and more ads, but with diminishing returns. In this module, you will learn to refocus on strategy with a marketer’s power tool: The Creative Brief.

Module 18: Evaluating Communications

This week, you will focus on multiple aspects of communications and advertising.

Module 19: Managing Brand Associations

Module 20: Loyalty Drivers

You will examine customer loyalty drivers and develop a customer loyalty strategy applying two key methods.

Module 21: Brand Orchestration and Implementation

Creating a winning brand strategy is a tremendous challenge, but the real challenge lies in implementing the strategy, the part of the process where breakdown usually occurs. This module ensures you can apply a practical model to guide brand strategy orchestration across your enterprise, one that aligns with these key elements.

Module 22: Great Marketing Plans

Almost every company creates an annual marketing plan and many spend hundreds of employee hours researching, preparing, and presenting their tomes to senior executives. But most marketing plans are a waste of time; they are too long, too complicated, and too dense. In this module, you will understand how to create great marketing plans to persuasively sell recommendations.

Module 23: Developing Your People

As we move up in organizations, developing and mentoring one’s direct reports becomes a critical skill, and yet many leaders struggle to do it well. You will learn how deliberate development can powerfully impact individual and organizational success, with insights.

Module 24: Wrap-Up and Action Planning

Nick Caffentzis - Academic Director; Senior Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Marketing

Eric Leininger - Academic Director;

Timothy Calkins - Clinical Professor of Marketing; Associate Chair of the Marketing Department

Gregory Carpenter - James Farley/Booz Allen Hamilton Professor of Marketing Strategy; Director of the Center for Market Leadership; Faculty Director, Kellogg Markets & Customers Initiative

Carter Cast - Clinical Professor of Strategy; Michael S. and Mary Sue Shannon Clinical Endowed Professor

Jonathan Copulsky - Lecturer of Marketing, Kellogg Executive Education and Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, Northwestern University

Gina Fong - Adjunct Lecturer of Marketing; Principal of Fong Insight

Steven Franconeri - Professor of Psychology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Director, Northwestern Cognitive Science Program; Professor of Leadership, Kellogg School of Management (Courtesy)

Julie Hennessy - Clinical Professor of Marketing

Kevin McTigue - Clinical Associate Professor of Marketing

Thomas O'Toole - Associate Dean of Executive Education; Clinical Professor of Marketing

Nicholas A. Pearce - Clinical Professor of Management & Organizations

Derek D. Rucker - Sandy & Morton Goldman Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies in Marketing; Professor of Marketing; Co-chair of Faculty Research

Mohanbir Sawhney - Associate Dean for Digital Innovation; McCormick Foundation Chair of Technology; Clinical Professor of Marketing; Director of the Center for Research in Technology and Innovation

Brooke Vuckovic - Clinical Professor of Management & Organizations

Florian Zettelmeyer - Nancy L. Ertle Professor of Marketing; Faculty Director, Program on Data Analytics at Kellogg

What is the program about?

Kellogg Accelerated Marketing Leadership program is designed to help learners gain an end-to-end perspective on the modern marketing operating model, from crafting strategic content to leveraging data analytics to connect with customers. Based on Kellogg’s pillars of marketing success — developing strategy, understanding customers, using analytics, and making customer connections — and underpinned with personal and functional leadership skills – the curriculum will position learners to advance their careers in the marketing function.

What is the learning experience?

Your learning experience will consist of concepts, information, and frameworks delivered via video lectures, live webinars, real world examples and case studies, application of frameworks through weekly activities, customized assignments and quizzes, discussion boards, and faculty engagement. Program participants will utilize a weekly digital leadership journal to capture learnings and applications that culminate in a final action plan, bringing together key concepts from the program.

What is the program format?

The program consists of 23 modules delivered over 24 weeks online, with the final week focused on building an plan to put your learning into action. Learners can expect to dedicate 4-6 hours per week to watch videos, complete assignments and participate in discussions. Modules are opened at the beginning of each week and have quizzes/assessments at the module’s conclusion. Learners may choose to engage with the program module all in one sitting or in smaller segments of time throughout the week. While the modules do not close, access to assignments is closed each week.

Could a learner choose to opt out of some topics?

No. This is an online program in which a topic module is introduced each week and the learner is expected to watch the video lectures, participate in the live webinars, complete the exercises/activities and take the mastery quiz at the end of each week to progress to the subsequent week’s topic.

Are any of the sessions delivered in real time (live)?

There will be live webinars, led by faculty and/or subject matter experts, delivered during the course of the program via a video conferencing platform. These sessions provide learners an opportunity to listen and ask questions, and while they are valuable in enhancing the overall experience, attendance is not mandatory. All live sessions are recorded for later viewing.

What methods will be used for grading and evaluations?

Kellogg program leaders will review assignments, discussions and exercises to determine participants’ understanding of the material.

How much time is allocated to complete assignments?

The due date for submitting assignments is typically within 7 days of the module opening, but can be as long as 14 days, depending on the scope of the assignment. However, learners may request deadline extensions to accommodate business and personal conflicts that may arise during the program timeframe. Reach out to the program leader to discuss any challenges you may have in completing assignments.

Can participation in this program be counted as credit toward a degree, either at Kellogg, Northwestern University or another academic institution?

No. Executive Education offers only non-degree programs and each participant receives a certificate of completion at the end of the program. This certificate does not count as credit toward a degree. In addition, at this time, our online programs do not count as credit toward a Kellogg Executive Scholar Certificate.

Does the program offer community engagement for learners?

Yes, participants can create a profile, connect and collaborate with peers, and interact with academic/industry experts such as program leaders and teaching assistants. Office hours will be held during the program and all participants are welcome to join in with questions or to discuss assignments.

What are the requirements for accessing the program?

Participants will need the following to access the Advertising and Marketing Communication Strategy program:

• Valid email address
• Computing device connected to the internet (Mac/PC/laptop, tablet or smartphone)
• The latest version of your preferred browser to access our learning platform (Chrome and Firefox are preferred for accessing Canvas)
• Microsoft Office and PDF viewer to access content such as documents, spreadsheets, presentations, PDF files, and transcripts
• Additional software and resources may be required for certain programs — this will be communicated upon registration and/or at the beginning of the program
• PLEASE NOTE: Google, Vimeo and YouTube may be utilized in the program delivery

Do the programs offer a certificate?

Yes. Participants will receive a digital certificate of completion from Kellogg following a successful conclusion to the program. Since this program is graded as a pass or fail, participants must receive an 80% to pass and obtain the certificate. This digital certificate can be shared with colleagues and posted on LinkedIn. (PLEASE NOTE: We do not provide reports of assessments, or “transcripts,” since this is a non-degree program.)

Who is Emeritus and what is their relationship with Kellogg Executive Education?

Kellogg Executive Education is partnering with Emeritus Institute of Management, an online education provider, to develop and deliver this program. By working with Emeritus, we are able to provide broader access to Executive Education, beyond our on-campus offerings, in a collaborative and engaging format that is consistent with Kellogg’s standard of quality.

Additional questions?

Please contact us by calling 847-467-6018 or email us at execedonline@kellogg.northwestern.edu.