Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Welcome to Chinese CEO Club

Welcome to Northwestern University and one of the classrooms that you will be visiting this week. My colleagues and I at Northwestern welcome you to one of the key centers of management, marketing and business education in the United States. For most of your time in Chicago you will be with your own classmates, but we will bring you together as we are doing this morning to listen to our most senior and prestigious faculty. For several business visits you will be with your classmates but for a unique visit to the Chicago Stock Exchange, a brand new opportunity to visit Navistar Headquarters who make international harvester trucks. You will hear from a manager Mr. Zheng on .....issues of world finance. You will also be together for a special wine party with several luxury stores including Louis Vitton and a Rolex jewelry store in a world class shopping mall.

During the week you will also visit Motorola for a meeting with their leadership as well as the world's largest publicly traded distribution company Grainger. There will be some variation in your You will be with Don Schultz this morning. Don Schultz who has been called been called one of the emperors of branding in a recent book featuring his work and the father of integrated marketing communications will speak with you this morning. Don has traveled all over the world and much of China.

You will discuss consumer marketing issues with Professor Bobby Calder from the Kellogg School of Management. Professor Calder is the author editor of a new book Kellogg on Advertising and Media and also the academic genius behind one of the most commonly used management and marketing research techniques -focus groups.

Using extremely productive Kellogg and Harvard cases you will be lead by Department Chairman in Kellogg and Professor Paul Hirsh. All our faculty including me have spent significant time teaching at EMBA programs in China, Asia and the rest of the world. I have taught MBA and IMC students for 30 years. While much of my work has been with business to business issues I also appear on television to speak about politics in the U.S. and the implications of politics and business.

During your visit to Chicago (how many of you is this the first time in Chicago) you will visit our beautiful new city park, take a boat tour to see our newest and historical skyscrapers, We will take you on a tour of our campus. NU is ranked one of the top dozen universities in the U.S. for undergraduates but we rank number one in many fields including Business, fields of engineering,theater, journalism, IMC. We know that you will want to come back to Chicago for the 2016 Olympics (we will know the city on Friday). We have many more corporations to visit, many more world class faculty and much, much more to see and eat.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Watch this space for a review of a debate on PR or Marketing - Who leads?

Welcome to the Graduate Class of 2010 Medill IMC Northwestern

As a member of the faculty, I have been welcoming you and your peers since 1989. My reason for coming to Northwestern was to build the new IMC program with my senior colleagues Martin Block, Ted Spiegel, Don Schultz and Paul Wang. Other faculty who are retired still advise us including Emeritus Professor Ray Ewing. Ray thankfully thought that I would be a good addition to Medill with my recent joint doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in both Business and in Mass Communications (PR and Advertising). Having taught marketing communications in schools of business, I was anxious to show students and business leaders that a program in marcom rather than only a single course would be of great value to them.

It is still our goal with new full-time faculty including senior faculty Frank Mulhern, Ed Malthouse,n to educate and train each class of this successful program that Kalyan Rama will allow you to lead in businesses and other organizations with your knowledge and skills in strategic communications. I will talk about our next generation, extremely gifted junior faculty in a forthcoming blog. No MBA candidate in the current class of 110,000 for 2010 or in past classes will have as much knowledge of business and strategic communications. No MBA will have as much knowledge of both customer purchase behavior databases and stakeholder databases of quotes, comments and promises as you will have in the next 15 months and 25 years.

I suggest that you consider some resources as part of your weekly personal assignment. And, I suggest that you write to as many of your colleagues from work, your classmates, family and friends in business to tell them where you are, what you are doing and when you will graduate. Share websites,articles, lecture notes or quotes with them over the next 15 months so they can help you handle the stress of graduate school and find job opportunities for you.

1. Consider the reading room in Medill for old fashioned "ink on paper" newspapers but use our IMC reading room, the computer station there or your laptop for current trade publications in IMC including public relations, advertising, direct marketing, interactive marketing, marketing and more.
2. Use the wwww.prsa.org website for professional activities and job advice
3. Monitor this blog site IMCProf for IMC insights or Twitter "IMCProf" for more of my comments on IMC and life.
4. Sign-up today on www.linkedin.com and the IMC community on that site to maximize job and internship opportunities.
5. Read www.culprit.com, and www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog/ for top notch comments on the state of marcom and PR.
6. Go to www.awpagesociety.com, www.prsa.org, http://www.instituteforpr.org/, http://www.prfirms.org/, http://www.iabc.com/, http://www.prsa.org/JobCenter, http://www.prquickstart.org/, http://www.vss.com/ more to come
7. Watch the development of the new Integrated Marketing Communications Association (you are automatically members) by following their first summit on IMC and Branding at www.GBSconference.com
8. Consider reading the books of your faculty on display in the glass case of IMC. We are a prolific faculty worth reading.
9. Work to create an IMC social action program (volunteers) to help others around the world while you are here. Take a look at www.aidmatrix.org as a possibility.
10. Sign-up for the Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications. It is the most successful, longest running independent IMC student program involving the greatest number of students. Be sure to attend the 2010 JIMC "launch" this Fall.

Welcome to Northwestern University, Medill and IMC. More to come.