Kevin Lane Keller

Why organisations work with Kevin Lane Keller

• He authored the framework most senior marketers were trained on. The Customer-Based Brand Equity model, his 1993 Journal of Marketing paper, is the reference point that brand equity conversations still anchor to.
• He co-authors the standard MBA marketing textbook. Marketing Management with Philip Kotler is in its 16th edition and sits on the syllabus of most top business schools, which means his vocabulary is already shared by the room.
• He has advised brand strategy at Accenture, American Express, Disney, Ford, Intel, Nike, P&G, Samsung, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Google, so the case material is current rather than historical.
• He treats the tension between short-term performance marketing and long-term brand building as a capital allocation question, not a creative one, which lands with CFOs and CEOs as well as CMOs.
• He brings the academic credibility of 135+ peer-reviewed papers and a Tuck professorship without retreating into theory; the work has been pressure-tested in expert witness testimony for Amazon, Meta, Mercedes-Benz, and the NFL.

Biography highlights

• E. B. Osborn Professor of Marketing, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College.
• Author of Strategic Brand Management, 5th edition, co-authored with Vanitha Swaminathan, widely referred to as the “bible of branding.”
• Co-author with Philip Kotler and Alex Chernev of Marketing Management, 16th edition.
• Originator of the Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) model, 1993 Journal of Marketing.
• Former Executive Director of the Marketing Science Institute, 2013 to 2015.
• Previously held tenured marketing posts at Stanford Graduate School of Business, UC Berkeley, and UNC Chapel Hill.

Biography

The argument over what brand investment is actually for has moved from the marketing function to the boardroom. Finance leaders want a defensible link between brand spend and enterprise value. Marketing leaders are negotiating between short-term performance metrics and the longer arc of customer preference. Keller’s work is the framework most of those conversations are still built on.

His 1993 Journal of Marketing paper introduced the Customer-Based Brand Equity model, which redefined brand value as what customers know, feel, and recognise about a brand rather than as a balance-sheet residual. The CBBE pyramid remains a standard reference for measuring brand strength inside organisations like Accenture, American Express, Disney, Nike, P&G, and Samsung, all of which have drawn on his counsel.

He co-authors Marketing Management with Philip Kotler and Alex Chernev, now in its 16th edition, and Strategic Brand Management with Vanitha Swaminathan, now in its 5th. Both textbooks are core curriculum at most top business schools, which means most CMOs in the room were trained inside his vocabulary. He has held tenured positions at Stanford, Berkeley, and UNC before Tuck, and served as Executive Director of the Marketing Science Institute.

Keller’s current work focuses on how brands hold their position when AI reshapes media buying, customer experience, and pricing simultaneously. He addresses the tension senior teams face directly: how to keep building the brand asset when every dashboard rewards the campaign.

Key speaking topics

• Customer-based brand equity
• Building global power brands
• Brand strategy and brand architecture
• Integrated marketing communications
• The economics of brand investment
• AI and the future of brand management
• Marketing strategy at the CEO and CFO level

Ideal for

• CMOs and brand leaders defending brand investment to boards and finance functions
• CEOs and CFOs evaluating how brand contributes to enterprise value
• Marketing leadership offsites and senior marketing development programmes
• Global brand and category teams in consumer, technology, and financial services

Audience outcomes

• A shared vocabulary, grounded in the CBBE framework, for discussing brand value across marketing, finance, and the executive team
• A clearer view of how short-term performance activity and long-term brand building reinforce or undermine each other
• Diagnostic tools for assessing where a brand is strong, vulnerable, or under-leveraged in current category dynamics
• A current perspective on what AI changes, and does not change, for brand strategy
• Case context from senior brand decisions inside Nike, Disney, P&G, Samsung, Google, and others