Tim Calkins
Marketing professor and brand strategist helping leaders build stronger brands and better presentations
- Marketing educator and speaker at Kellogg School of Management, known for his dynamic teaching on strategy and brand building, with multiple top teaching awards to his name.
- Acclaimed author of branding and business communication books, including How to Wash a Chicken, Defending Your Brand and Breakthrough Marketing Plans.
- Trusted consultant to Fortune 500 companies, advising organizations like Abbott and Novo Nordisk on brand strategy and competitive positioning.
Full Profile
Tim Calkins: Mastering Brand Strategy and Business Communication
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 and Biomedical Marketing.
Tim is a prolific 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). Earlier, Tim wrote Breakthrough Marketing Plans (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 and 2008). He was co-editor of Kellogg on Branding (Wiley, 2005) and Kellogg on Branding in a Hyper-Connected World (Wiley, 2019).
Tim has received numerous awards for his teaching. 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 to have won it twice in the award’s more than forty-year history. He was a finalist again in 2022 and 2023. In 2018, he received the Top Professor Award from Germany’s Kellogg-WHU Executive MBA Program. He received the Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award in 2008 and 2022. In 2016, Poets & Quants included him on its list of “Favorite MBA Professors.”
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.” You can find the blog at www.timcalkins.com
In addition to teaching at Kellogg, Tim works with major corporations on strategy and branding issues. His recent clients include Abbott, Amgen, and Novo Nordisk.
Tim began his career at the consulting firm Booz Allen and Hamilton. 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.