works with companies around the world on marketing strategy issues

Programs typically involve speaking, teaching, and/or workshops. Please reach out to have a discussion about the topics that interest your firm. Some of the most popular sessions are listed below.

Sessions at a Glance

Strategic Marketing Fundamentals

Duration: 90 minutes

Marketing is far more than advertising or the 4P’s. At its core, it answers one fundamental question: how do we get people to choose us? In this session, Professor Kevin McTigue cuts through the noise to give executives a rigorous, practical foundation in marketing strategy and value creation. Drawing on real-world cases and decades of experience across agencies, client-side brand management, and consulting, McTigue challenges participants to think like marketers regardless of their functional role, because in today’s environment, everyone is in the business of creating and communicating value.

What you’ll walk away with:

A clear, actionable definition of marketing and how it applies beyond traditional marketing roles
A framework for understanding how customers perceive value and how to create more of it than your competition
The three essential marketing questions every leader should be able to answer: Who is our target? What makes our solution better? How do we execute it?
An introduction to the 7T’s tactical framework for designing, communicating, and delivering value
An understanding of how digital transformation, machine learning, and generative AI are reshaping every dimension of marketing strategy and execution

Can pair with: Buckley’s Cough Syrup case

Setting Marketing Goals & Objectives

Duration: 90 minutes

Many organizations are surprisingly bad at setting clear goals, and the result is teams running hard at “best practice tactics” that don’t actually move the business. This session gives you a disciplined approach to defining what success looks like, deconstructing it into achievable steps, and pressure-testing the work your team brings to the table.

Learning Objectives:

Use Issue Trees to map and prioritize the real drivers of a business problem before chasing solutions
Apply Cascading Goals to translate long-term vision into annual goals, marketing objectives, and clear day-to-day guidance for your team
Identify your Path to Growth by examining the core routes to growing a business and recognizing why choosing the wrong one (or splintering resources across many) wastes time and money
Deploy the Goal → Impediment → Solution framework to diagnose why customers aren’t behaving the way you need them to, and pinpoint the interventions that will actually change that

Modern Targeting: Who Are We For?

Duration: 90 – 180 minutes

In today’s fragmented digital landscape, marketers face relentless pressure to chase the latest tactics. The most powerful growth decisions begin long before any ad is placed. Drawing on the SpotHero or Red Lobster case study, this session demonstrates why identifying the right customer is more consequential than any channel or technology choice. Through a blend of strategic frameworks and real-world examples, participants will learn how to evaluate segments by their true value to the business, navigate competitive dynamics, and harness modern digital and AI-powered tools to reach audiences with precision and efficiency.

Participants will leave with the ability to:

Apply a rigorous value analysis to prioritize customer segments based on customer lifetime value, cost of acquisition, and competitive white space
Use the Targeting Bull’s-eye framework to allocate resources across strategic, opportunistic, and adjacent audiences
Navigate common multi-target scenarios including new growth segments, B2B stakeholder maps, brand portfolios, and ML-generated micro-segments
Understand how programmatic advertising, real-time bidding, and lookalike targeting work and how to deploy them strategically
Leverage Customer Data Platforms and machine learning to automate personalized outreach at scale without sacrificing strategic focus

Pairs with: Red Lobster case, SpotHero case, or participant workshop

Positioning: Why Are We Better?

Duration: 90 – 180 minutes

In a noisy world where customers won’t remember much about you, your single most important marketing decision is what you choose them to remember. This session cuts to the heart of competitive strategy: why would your target choose you over the competition, or over doing nothing at all? Through real-world examples, hands-on frameworks, and live exercises, participants will develop the strategic clarity to articulate a compelling, differentiated position and write a tight positioning statement they can use immediately.

What You’ll Walk Away With:

A working understanding of the Positioning Statement framework and how to apply it to any product, service, or organization
The ability to define and strategically choose a Frame of Reference, and to understand how that choice shapes your competitive set, growth path, and pricing power
Practical tools for identifying your most compelling differentiating benefit, including primary research, digital message testing, attribute value mapping, and benefit laddering
Skill in moving between functional and emotional benefits to find the “MADE” sweet spot: positioning that is Meaningful, Authentic, Different, and Enduring
A positioning statement you’ve drafted and pressure-tested during the session

Advanced Positioning Strategy: Owning Your Space Across Segments and Time

Duration: 90 minutes

Building on core positioning principles, this session challenges executives to think beyond the single positioning statement and manage brand strategy at a portfolio level. You’ll examine how leading brands simultaneously hold multiple positioning layers, from tactical product communications to overarching brand purpose, and how to keep those layers coherent and mutually reinforcing.

Participants will leave with the ability to:

Evaluate target segments on two dimensions (customer value and company value) to identify the highest-priority advertising opportunity
Identify perception gaps across segments and map them against attribute importance to surface the most actionable positioning territory
Manage a brand architecture in which masterbrand, product category, and tactical communications each carry distinct but aligned positioning
Assess competitive positioning across multiple players to determine where differentiation can realistically be claimed and defended over time
Build scenario models linking positioning investments to funnel movement and revenue impact

Pairs with: Finding Claude’s Voice LLM Positioning case

Practical Customer Journey Mapping: From Insight to Strategy

Duration: 90 – 180 minutes

In today's complex marketplace, understanding how customers actually make decisions — not how we wish they would — is the foundation of effective marketing. This session introduces a practical, hybrid approach to customer journey mapping that combines the strategic clarity of traditional purchase funnel models with the customer-centric precision of modern experience design. Rather than expensive, months-long research projects, participants learn to build actionable journey maps quickly using existing knowledge, structured frameworks, and cross-functional team input.

What you'll take away:

A repeatable 8-step methodology for building customer journey maps efficiently, without costly primary research
The ability to identify and articulate triggers — the critical moments that move customers from passive to active — and design marketing strategies around them
A framework for mapping customer needs, attitudes, and behaviors across each stage of the purchase journey, from pre-need through post-purchase
Practical tools for translating journey insights into prioritized omnichannel tactics, phase-specific business goals, and measurable KPIs
A strategic lens for identifying gaps in customer experience that represent opportunities for differentiation and competitive advantage

Pairs with (one of these):

Mercedes case
Lecture on Creating a Differentiating Experience. Using Walt Disney examples, we examine 5 lessons for creating great customer experiences and show how those translate to the business world. Examples explore the use of the journey map to find differentiation and the 2x2 Customer Experience map.
Company-specific journey breakout – Teams work on journeys for their brand/line of business.

Advertising Strategy: From Brief to Impact

Duration: 90 minutes

Great advertising doesn’t happen by accident. It starts with a clear, disciplined strategy. This session introduces the Creative Brief as the foundational tool of advertising strategy, exploring how successful campaigns are built at the intersection of the right strategy, the right creative, and the right media. Through real-world examples and hands-on critique, participants learn to diagnose what separates effective advertising from the noise, and how to lead the process that produces it.

Participants will leave able to:

Define the six core components of a Creative Brief and explain what each must accomplish
Translate business objectives into specific, actionable advertising objectives that creative teams can actually use
Make sharper targeting decisions by understanding why focus produces better results than broad reach
Identify common brief failures such as vague objectives, undifferentiated positioning, and copy-driven “insights”, and correct them
Understand their role as a business leader in the Strategy → Creative → Media chain, and where their involvement has the greatest leverage

Ad Evaluation: Giving Creative Feedback That Drives Results

Duration: 90 minutes

In this session, participants explore one of the most high-stakes moments in marketing: walking into a room to evaluate creative work from an agency. Drawing on the ADPLAN framework developed at Kellogg, participants learn how to move beyond gut reactions and personal preferences to give structured, strategic feedback that actually improves outcomes.

Learning Outcomes:

Apply the ADPLAN framework (Attention, Distinction, Positioning, Linkage, Amplification, Net Equity) to systematically evaluate creative executions
Distinguish between strategic critique (assessing whether an ad delivers on the creative brief) and execution critique
Give specific, actionable feedback that guides creative teams toward better work without dictating solutions
Recognize common failure modes in ad creative, including weak brand linkage, poor positioning, and negative amplification
Connect qualitative creative judgments to formal ad testing methodologies and research metrics

Note: Advertising Strategy and Ad Evaluation sessions are ideally taught together, with a hands-on team exercise: developing a brief, creating a simple ad concept using AI tools, and critiquing another team’s work.

Performance vs. Brand Marketing: Maximizing Impact in a Full-Funnel Approach

Duration: 90 minutes

How should you allocate marketing dollars between brand-building and performance channels when one is easy to measure but often overstates its impact, and the other quietly creates demand but resists clean attribution? Using Airbnb’s high-stakes decision to pivot away from search-driven performance marketing toward brand investment, this session gives executives the analytical toolkit to make this call with confidence.

Learning outcomes. By the end of this session, you will be able to:

Articulate the strategic trade-offs between brand-building and performance marketing, and recognize where each genuinely creates incremental value versus where one is taking credit for the other’s work
Critically evaluate the major digital attribution models (last-touch, first-touch, linear, time-decay, and multi-touch) and identify their structural blind spots, particularly in light of cookie deprecation and platform privacy changes
Use segment-level funnel analysis (awareness → consideration → purchase) combined with margin data to pinpoint where marketing investment will produce the greatest financial return
Apply incrementality thinking and randomized controlled trial design (including hybrid approaches like the PIE model) to separate ads that drive sales from ads that take credit for sales that would have happened anyway
Diagnose the limitations of ROAS as a primary decision metric and recognize when revenue-based optimization misaligns with margin, CLV, and long-term brand equity goals

International Branding & Purpose-Driven Marketing

Duration: 90 minutes

Building a brand that travels well across borders is one of the hardest problems in marketing and one of the highest-stakes decisions for any executive responsible for growth. Through the lens of Stella Artois’s expansion across the UK, US, Mexico, and South Africa, this session examines what it takes to keep a brand’s core identity intact while adapting to very different consumers, competitors, and cultural contexts.

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

Evaluate market expansion strategies across countries at different stages of category development, and find the right balance between global consistency and local relevance
Diagnose the conditions under which laddering from functional to emotional or higher-order positioning strengthens a brand, and when it dilutes or damages it
Apply tactical levers across product, packaging, distribution, and experiential marketing to bring a premium value proposition to life and increase perceived differentiation
Assess when cause- or purpose-driven marketing is the right strategic choice, and the execution principles of authenticity, cultural awareness, and meaningfulness required to do it well
Recognize the warning signs of brand dissonance and inauthentic purpose claims, drawing on contemporary successes and high-profile failures

Generative AI for Marketers: From Tactics to Breakthrough Innovation

Duration: 90 minutes

Generative AI is reshaping marketing faster than most organizations can adapt, changing how consumers discover products to how campaigns are built and deployed. This session cuts through the hype to give marketing leaders a practical command of where GenAI creates real value today, and hands-on experience using it as a force multiplier for their own strategic work. Participants leave not just informed, but equipped to act.

Participants will leave with the ability to:

Distinguish where GenAI and ML create the most leverage across the marketing funnel, from brand building to performance marketing, and calibrate their investment accordingly
Understand the emerging landscape of AI-powered campaign tools, including automated ad creation and optimization platforms, and evaluate when to embrace versus critically question their use
Navigate the shift to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) as AI-driven search fundamentally changes how brands get found
Conduct a structured, AI-powered innovation ideation session that moves from unmet consumer needs through divergent idea generation, opportunity prioritization, feasibility assessment, and concept visualization
Apply GenAI as a genuine strategic accelerator rather than a shortcut, preserving the human judgment and differentiated thinking that creates competitive advantage

AI & Machine Learning for Marketing Leaders

Duration: 90 minutes

In a world where every competitor has access to the same AI tools, the real advantage lies in knowing how to use them strategically. This session cuts through the hype to give marketing executives a practical foundation in how machine learning actually works and where it creates genuine business value. Using Disney+ as a rich case study, participants explore how data-driven decisions get made at scale, what separates AI initiatives that deliver from those that disappoint, and why the quality of your data and the clarity of your objective matter far more than the sophistication of your algorithm.

Participants will leave able to:

Distinguish between descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics and know which to reach for depending on the business question
Evaluate first-, second-, and third-party data sources and understand how privacy trends are reshaping the data landscape
Identify and prioritize AI use cases using a structured value-vs.-complexity framework
Design experiments that generate reliable, actionable insights
Spot the most common failure modes in AI initiatives, including sampling bias, confounds, and misaligned success metrics, before they become costly mistakes

Case: Disney+ 2.0

Assumption-Based Modeling for Prioritization with Imperfect Information

Duration: 90 minutes

Most consequential business decisions get made with imperfect information (new tactics, untested channels, novel ideas), yet teams still need to commit real budget and defend those choices to skeptical stakeholders. This session equips leaders with a structured approach for evaluating opportunities when historical data simply doesn’t exist. Working through real-world examples, including Coinbase’s $13M Super Bowl ad and a Purell go-to-market case, participants learn to break any tactic down into its component assumptions about reach, engagement, and outcomes, turning gut instinct into a defensible business case.

By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

Apply the Goal → Impediment → Solution framework to structure decisions in ambiguous environments
Decompose any marketing or business tactic into testable assumptions across reach, engagement, and outcomes
Build a credible business case for new or unproven initiatives that lack historical benchmarks
Compare disparate tactical options (e.g., advertising vs. sampling vs. distribution investment) on a consistent quantitative basis
Identify which assumptions carry the most risk and design lightweight measurement plans to validate them
Drive stakeholder alignment by making underlying assumptions transparent, debatable, and improvable over time

The Evolution of Digital Marketing

Duration: 90 minutes

Digital advertising has transformed dramatically over the past three decades, evolving from the first static banner ad in 1997 to today’s AI-automated, personalized campaigns. This session walks executives through five distinct generations of digital advertising (banner and search, programmatic data, social and influencer, retail media, and automated personalization), examining how creative, media buying, measurement, and production have evolved in parallel.

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

Map the five generations of digital advertising and recognize how each shift in capability creates new strategic opportunities and risks
Distinguish between programmatic and place-based media buying, and apply contextual targeting in a privacy-constrained world
Differentiate brand-building from performance marketing, and align search, SEO, SEM, and emerging Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to the right business objectives
Develop a social media strategy that integrates paid advertising, ongoing content, and community management, including a defined response process and crisis plan
Apply the “Reach × Influence = Outcomes” framework to evaluate influencer and KOL partnerships using evidence-based criteria
Assess how retail media networks use first-party data and closed-loop attribution to deliver measurable impact
Evaluate where GenAI and machine learning genuinely add value (and where they don’t) across creative, media, optimization, and production

Branding: Building and Leveraging One of Your Most Valuable Assets

Duration: 90 minutes

Branding is far more than logos and color palettes. It is a strategic lever that drives pricing power, customer loyalty, and long-term enterprise value. In this session, you’ll learn how brands actually work in the customer’s mind, why consistent brand cues create measurable performance advantages, and how to make smarter decisions about building, extending, and managing your brand portfolio.

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

Articulate why brand equity translates directly into pricing power, win rates, distribution leverage, and competitive insulation, and how to make the case internally for investing in it
Identify the brand elements and cues that drive recognition and differentiation, and audit your own organization’s consistency across every customer touchpoint
Apply a four-question framework (Can we win? Can we afford it? Will it be incremental? How should we brand it?) to evaluate any brand extension opportunity
Navigate the spectrum from “branded house” to “house of brands” and decide where new offerings belong in your portfolio without diffusing the equity of your masterbrand
Choose between descriptive and evocative naming approaches based on your brand architecture, competitive context, and willingness to invest in building meaning over time

Also consult on specific projects or issues. Due to time constraints, these tend to be short engagements, lasting up to one week.

If you are interested in having Kevin work with your group you can contact him directly