Tim Calkins helps people and organizations build strong brands; he is an award-winning 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. 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.
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. 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 is an award-winning author. His latest book, How to Wash a Chicken – Mastering the Business Presentation (Page Two, 2018), was named Top Business Book by the IndieReader Discovery Awards, and received the Gold Prize for Business and Economics from the Foreword Indie Book of the Year Awards.
Tim 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. Earlier, Tim wrote Breakthrough Marketing Plans (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 and 2008).
In addition, Tim was co-editor of Kellogg on Branding in a Hyper-Connected World (John Wiley & Sons, 2019) and Kellogg on Branding (John Wiley & Sons, 2005).
Tim maintains a blog on brand strategy: Building Strong Brands. 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 including Crestor, MedImmune: FluMist Introduction and Genzyme: the Synvisc-One Investment Decision. He 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 ANA Genius Awards, 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 Caterpillar, Moderna, Astellas and AbbVie. He is president 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. He has appeared on all the major television networks.
He serves on the board of the Alliance Française de Chicago and is an Elder at Fourth Presbyterian Church. He served two terms on the board of the Lycée Français, Chicago’s French-International School.
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.
