NACS Marketing Leadership Program at Kellogg

The NACS Master of Convenience designation acknowledges the hard work and investment NACS members have made in their personal leadership development. It is awarded to convenience retailers who have attended 3 or more of the 5 NACS Executive Education programs. For questions, contact Brandi Mauro, NACS Education Program Manager: bmauro@convenience.org or (703) 518-4223.

Tim Calkins helps people and organizations build strong brands; he is a marketing professor, author, speaker and consultant.

He is Clinical Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Manageent. He teaches courses including Marketing Strategy and Biomedical Marketing, and is 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 2013 and 2006, making him one of just five 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.”

Over the years, he has written four books. His latest is How to Wash a Chicken – Mastering the Business Presentation (Page Two, 2018). He 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. Tim wrote Breakthrough Marketing Plans (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 and 2008) and was co-editor of Kellogg on Branding(John Wiley & Sons, 2005).

Tim manages Building Strong Brands, a blog on brand strategy. 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 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 Pfizer, PepsiCo, Eli Lilly 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, TheWall Street Journal and The New York Times. He 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.

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.

Rives Collins was honored with a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence Award at Northwestern University, where he has taught in the Department of Theatre for the past thirty years. An acclaimed professional storyteller (ORACLE AWARD, National Storytelling Network), he works with full faith that planting stories in the world is a bit like the work Johnny Appleseed once did. He recently delivered the keynote address at the National Storytelling Conference, celebrating the role of storytelling in the 21st century, and was subsequently honored to reprise the presentation at The Cradle of Creativity conference in Cape Town, South Africa, as an American delegate to the international congress of ASSITEJ. At the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, he teaches business narrative in the Advanced Management Program, asserting that storytelling is a differentiating skill in the 21stcentury that strengthens leaders, brands, and organizations. He is the co-author with Pamela Cooper of The Power of Story: Teaching Through Storytelling, proclaiming that, “Storytelling is at the heart of everything I do.” In addition, Collins is head of the Theatre for Young Audiences program at Northwestern (JOHNNY SALDAÑA OUTSTANDING PROFESSOR OF THEATRE EDUCATION, American Alliance for Theatre and Education), and is an active professional stage director, specializing in the development of new work. He is an Associate Artist at Adventure Stage Chicago of the Northwestern Settlement House, an organization working to disrupt generational cycles of poverty, where he has recently directed two world-premiere plays, both written by Northwestern Alum Tom Arvetis. Also, he recently directed two world-premiere productions at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, both written by Northwestern colleague Laura Schellhardt. As an active member and past president of the American Alliance for Theatre and Education, and as a current board member of the Children’s Theatre Foundation of America, he works with an international community of artists, educators, and scholars to champion the cause of drama and theatre in the lives of young people.

Scott has over 20 years of brand, marketing strategy, and new product development experience that he has brought to bear for many Prophet clients, including GE, Johnson and Johnson, Best Buy, NBC Universal, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Sara Lee, United Airlines, Kellogg’s, ExxonMobil, The Wrigley Company, Boeing and Allstate.

Scott is the author of Brand Asset Management: Driving Profitable Growth Through Your Brands (2000), named one of the top 30 books of 2000 by Executive Book Summaries. Scott’s second book, Building the Brand-Driven Business: Operationalize Your Brand to Drive Profitable Growth (2002) was published to highly regarded reviews. His third book, The Shift: The Transformation of Today’s Marketers into Tomorrow’s Growth Drivers was released in May 2009. Follow Scott on Twitter.

His previous work experience includes 12 years at Kuczmarski & Associates (K&A), an innovation and branding consulting company, where he was Senior Partner and founder of the Brand Asset Management™ practice. Prior to K&A, Scott worked at Procter & Gamble, where he focused on a number of top global brands.

Scott speaks at and chairs branding conferences for organizations such as The Conference Board, American Marketing Association, American Management Association, and the Association of National Advertisers. He is frequently cited in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, BusinessWeek, Brandweek, Marketing News, Management Review, Advertising Age, and Crain’s.

Scott is an Adjunct Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, a featured speaker at the University of Chicago’s Executive Program on “Marketing Services Companies,” and a guest lecturer at other top graduate schools, including NYU, Harvard, Notre Dame, Medill, and Columbia.

Scott earned a Master of Management from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Marketing, Finance, and Management Strategy and a B.S. in Marketing Management from the University of Illinois.

Steven Franconeri is leading scientist, teacher, and speaker on visual thinking, visual communication, and the psychology of data visualization. He is a Professor of Psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences at Northwestern, Director of the Northwestern Cognitive Science Program, as well as a Kellogg Professor of Management & Organizations by Courtesy. He is the director of the Visual Thinking Laboratory, where a team of researchers explore how leveraging the visual system - the largest single system in your brain - can help people think, remember, and communicate more efficiently.

His undergraduate training was in computer science and cognitive science at Rutgers University, followed by a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University, and postdoctoral research at the University of British Columbia. His work on both Cognitive Science and Data Visualization has been funded by the National Science Foundation, as well as the Department of Education, and the Department of Defense. He has received a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award, given to researchers who combine excellent research with outstanding teaching, and he has received a Psychonomic Society Early Career award for his research on visual thinking.

Julie Hennessy is a Clinical Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and the Associate Chair of the Marketing Department. Professor Hennessy's MBA and Executive teaching focuses on the development of Marketing Strategies to enhance long-term competitive advantage and profitability. She works frequently with research and technology-driven firms that desire to become more customer-centric, in both new product/services and mature product/services categories.

At Kellogg, she teaches three courses: Introduction to Marketing, Advanced Marketing Strategy, and Marketing Consulting Lab. In addition to MBA courses, she teaches extensively at the Executive level. Recent Executive teaching assignments have included work with Facebook, Hyatt, SC Johnson, Abbvie, Novartis, Nestle, McDonalds, Microsoft, ABInBev, John Deere, Kraft/Heinz and Textron.

Professor Hennessy has been a regular recipient of teaching awards at the Kellogg School. In both 2017 and 2007, she received the Lawrence G. Lavengood Outstanding Professor of the Year Award, Kellogg's top award for teaching quality and impact, as voted by the Kellogg graduating class. She had been a finalist (top 5 faculty members) in consideration for the Lavengood Award in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. Professor Hennessy has also been recognized by her academic department, winning the Marketing Department's Core Course Teaching award. She has also received special student impact awards in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2017, and 2018.

Professor Hennessy's writing concentrates on cases for classroom use. Recent cases written include studies of Stella Artois in South Africa, Teach for India, Northwestern Memorial Hospital Hispanic Organ Transplant Program, Synthroid, TiVo, Apple iPod, Invisalign Orthodontics, and Biaxin and Zithromax in the antibiotics market.

Jim Lecinski is an associate professor in Medill’s Integrated Marketing Communications Program and member of the Spiegel Digital & Database Research Center’s Advisory Board.

Jim brings over 25 years experience growing revenue for brands through integrated, multi-channel and digital marketing. Having spent more than 10 years at Google, Jim’s most recent role at the company was vice president of U.S. sales and service. He also holds the position of Visiting Executive Lecturer in the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia.

Jim's book about digital marketing, "Winning the Zero Moment of Truth" known as ZMOT (pronounced: "Zhee MAHT”) was published in 2011, and has been read by over 300,000 marketers worldwide and featured in the New York Times, Advertising Age and Forbes.

Kevin McTigue is a Clinical Associate Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management teaching multiple classes for the MBA Program and Executive Education. His career spans over 20 years in teaching, consulting, brand management, and advertising.

Before his full-time appointment, Kevin led the Strategy & Consulting practice in the central region of the U.S. for global digital agency SapientRazorfish. His work focused on driving value for clients in a digital age. From marketing strategies to digital transformation roadmaps to creation of entirely new businesses, he advised senior Fortune 500 clients on how to best leverage digital to create value.

Prior to SapientRazorfish, he spent 7 years in brand management with Tyson/Hillshire Brands/Sara Lee leading businesses including Jimmy Dean, Ball Park, and Hillshire Farm lunchmeat. Over this time, he developed and launched multiple products, repositioned and developed new campaigns for all three major brands, and led all activities related to planning and running the business - achieving business targets, managing P&L, leading and developing teams, annual and long-range planning, pricing/trade strategy, innovation strategy, and brand building.

The first 10 Years of his career were in digital and traditional advertising at agencies such as marchFIRST, JWT, and BBDO. In this time, he led brand strategy work and campaign development for clients including Nestlé, Unilever, and Mars/Wrigley. His earliest professional years were spent at Abercrombie & Fitch where he was part of the first official class of merchants and probably the worst one.

Dr. Rucker holds the Sandy & Morton Goldman Professorship of Entrepreneurial Studies in Marketing. His primary research focuses broadly on the topics of social hierarchy, compensatory consumption, persuasion, and consumer behavior. His work asks, and seeks answers to, what makes for effective advertising and what motives underlies consumer consumption. To answer these questions Dr. Rucker draws on his rich training in social psychology. His work has appeared in leading journals that span psychology and marketing such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. In addition, his research has been covered in major media outlets such as The New York Times, Time Magazine, and ABC News.

Dr. Rucker currently teaches Advertising Strategy at Kellogg. The course focuses on basic psychological principles to better understand how to plan and execute successful advertising. In recognition of his commitment to teaching excellence Dr. Rucker was nominated as a finalist for the L.G. Lavengood Outstanding Professor of the Year Award and a recipient of the Top Elective Professor Award. In addition to his work in the classroom, Dr. Rucker is a co-instructor of the annual Kellogg Advertising Superbowl Review. The review is in the spirit of Kellogg's focus on experiential learning and cultivates basic principals learned in the classroom to critically evaluate advertising in a real world and high stakes environment.