NACS Marketing Leadership Program at Kellogg

Henry Armour is the president and CEO of NACS. He grew up working in his family’s retail businesses, Armour Oil Company, rising to the position of vice president and COO in 1977. In 1980, he joined The Standard Oil Company of Ohio, where he served as manager of development strategies. He later founded West Star Corporation, which grew to include 59 NOW! convenience stores, truck stops and quick-service restaurants in the Pacific Northwest until he sold the company in 2004. In 1988, Armour founded Epoch Corporation, which operated retail enterprises in California.

He became president and CEO of NACS in July 2005, having also served as the association’s chairman in 2002 and 2003. Armour earned a BA in economics from Stanford University, an MSc in economics from the London School of Economics, and an MBA and PhD in economics from Stanford University.

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.

Kelly Cutler is a lecturer of integrated marketing communications at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. She is also the founderand CEO of her own digital strategy firm.

Cutler brings more than 20 years of experience in digital marketing to Medill. Prior to founding her own company, she co-founded and led a Chicago-based search engine marketing firm for 11 years. She beganher career working for Classified Ventures, Cars.com and AOL. Over the years, she has provided digital marketing and innovative solutions for companies including Johns Hopkins, NorthShore University HealthSystem, Hub international, the Los Angeles Film Festival,HelloWorld and Ryland Homes.

Cutler's classes offer students hands-on experience with researching, utilizing and measuring cutting-edge digital marketing strategies and tactics. Through her classes, students explore various case studiesand experience the invaluable knowledge of prominent guest speakers in the expansive digital professional community, encompassing agency, client, adtech and measurement.

Gina Fong is a consumer anthropologist and the principal at Fong Insight, a marketing consulting firm based in Chicago, Illinois. She integrates creative problem solving, engaging storytelling, and analytical moderating to help her clients develop game-changing strategies for their business challenges. Gina brings the consumer to life within an organization, helping teams channel consumer insight to surprise and delight their audience across the entire consumer journey. She works with a variety of clients around the world, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to entrepreneurs, small business owners and start-ups.

Gina teaches, lectures and coaches in the US and internationally on the principles of consumer-centric marketing and is an Adjunct Lecturer at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Julie Hennessy is a Clinical Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. 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 for Growth and Defense, and Marketing Consulting Lab. In addition to MBA courses, she teaches extensively at the Executive level. Recent Executive teaching assignments have included work with Starbucks, Facebook, Hyatt, SC Johnson, Abbvie, Medtronic, 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.

Loran Nordgren is a professor of Management and Organizations and a national bestselling author. Loran’s mission is to use behavioral science to make leaders and organizations better. His research has been published in leading journals such as Science, and his ideas are regularly discussed in prominent forums such as the Harvard Business Review. In recognition of his work, Professor Nordgren has received the Theoretical Innovation Award in experimental psychology. A former Fulbright scholar, he has twice received Kellogg’s Teacher of the Year award. As a practitioner, Loran has worked with companies throughout the world on a wide-range of behavior change problems, a process he calls Behavioral Design. Loran’s first book The Human Element: overcoming the resistance that awaits new ideas, spent multiple weeks on the Wall Street Journal Bestseller list.

Thomas F. O'Toole is the Associate Dean of Executive Education at Kellogg, and Clinical Professor of Marketing, at the Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University. His work, teaching and research at Kellogg focuses on subjects including: connecting data science to business value creation, data-driven marketing, customer value management, digital business models and loyalty programs. He developed and teaches a Kellogg MBA course on Customer Loyalty strategy. Additionally, he teaches many C-level Executive Education programs, including: Leading with Big Data and Analytics, Advanced Marketing Management, The CMO Program and The Customer-Focused Organization. He developed and teaches the upcoming (2020) online Executive Education course on Customer Loyalty. He is the author of "Branding Services in the Digital Era" in Kellogg on Branding in a Hyper-Connected World (Wiley, 2019).

O'Toole is a Senior Advisor at McKinsey and Company. For McKinsey, he provides strategic guidance to clients in the Travel, Transportation and Logistics and other business sectors (e.g., energy, retail, health care) on enterprise data analytics, revenue strategy, customer value management, digital enterprise transformation, loyalty programs and related subjects.

O'Toole currently serves on the Board of Directors of three public companies: Alliant Energy (LNT), an S&P 500 company providing electricity, natural gas, renewable energy and logistics services through its production, distribution, transportation and related businesses; Extended Stay America (STAY), the largest integrated hotel owner/operator in North America, and the leading brand in the mid-priced extended stay segment, with over 600 hotels; and LSC Communications (LKSD), a leading provider of printing, publishing logistics, office products and related services. He serves on the Board of Directors of cxLoyalty, a world leader in loyalty programs and customer engagement solutions. In 2016, he was appointed by the US Secretary of Commerce to, and currently serves on, the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Travel Promotion (dba Brand USA), the nation's public-private enterprise to promote travel to the USA.

Until his retirement at the end of 2016, O'Toole was Chief Marketing Officer, Senior Vice President and President, MileagePlus of United Airlines. At United, he was responsible for brand strategy, marketing, product development, ecommerce, digital channels, ancillary revenue, co-brand credit cards, customer data analytics, marketing systems, partnerships and other functions, including United's MileagePlus loyalty program. MileagePlus was, at the time, the largest travel loyalty program, and top-rated frequent flyer program, in the world. He joined United as Chief Marketing Officer in 2010.

Before United, O'Toole was Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Information Officer for Hyatt Hotels Corporation, where over 13 years was responsible for Hyatt's marketing, loyalty program, distribution, information technology and related functions worldwide. He joined Hyatt as Vice President of Marketing in 1995.

O'Toole's career has spanned an exceptionally broad range of C-level executive positions, business accomplishments and marketing disciplines. He is a frequently invited speaker at conferences and programs on leading edge marketing practices, current marketing developments, data-driven marketing and related subjects. In 1998, he was named to the Advertising Age "Marketing 100".

O'Toole is active in civic, charitable, educational and philanthropic endeavors. He currently serves on the Boards of the CSU Foundation and the Big Shoulders Fund of Chicago.

O'Toole holds the degrees of Master of Applied Communication Theory and Methodology and Bachelor of Arts with concentration in communication research from the Cleveland State University. In 2013, he was named the Distinguished Alumnus of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.

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.

David Schonthal is an award-winning Professor of Strategy, Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management where he teaches courses on new venture creation, design thinking, healthcare innovation and creativity. In addition to his teaching, he also serves as the Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Kellogg and the Faculty Director of the Zell Fellows Program, a selective venture accelerator program designed to help student entrepreneurs successfully launch or acquire new businesses.

Along with his colleague Loran Nordgren, David is one of the originators of Friction Theory – a ground-breaking methodology that explains why even the most promising innovations and change initiatives oftenstruggle to gain traction with their intended audiences – and what to do about it. This work is popularized in David’s bestselling book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas (Wiley).

Outside of Kellogg David has been practitioner of entrepreneurship, design, and innovation for over 20 years. He previously spent a decade working at world-renowned design firm, IDEO, and currently servesas an Operating Partnerat 7Wire Ventures, a healthcare technology-focused venture capital firm, and also serves as a Venture Partner at Pritzker Group Venture Capital, a consumer and enterprise-focused fund. David is a Global Advisor at Design for Ventures(D4V), a Tokyo-based early-stage venture capital fund that invests in design-led Japanese startups and is the Co-Founder of MATTER, a 25,000-square-foot innovation center in Chicago focused on catalyzing and supporting healthcare entrepreneurship.

He is a contributing writer to Forbes, Inc., Fortune and Harvard Business Review magazines, authoring articles on strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship, design and change.David has been honored on Crain'sChicago Business magazine's "40 Under 40" list (back when he was under 40) and is currently a Distinguished Achievement Award Finalist for Thinkers50, an international organization that identifies, ranks, and shares the leading management ideas of our age.He has won Kellogg’s Executive MBA Outstanding Professor award 5 times as well as a Faculty Impact Award for excellence in teaching.

David earned his MBA from The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and his BA in International Relations from Boston University.

As much as David would like to think he’s one-of-a-kind…he’s actually a triplet.