The Marketing Mission
Kelly Cutler’s goal is to teach mpd² students the go-to-market principles that keep good ideas from falling into the wasteland of failed products.
Every year, companies spend millions of dollars to broadcast commercials during the Super Bowl. And every year, there are a handful of ads that are complete duds, making consumers question the ad — and the brand itself.
Kelly Cutler’s mission is to help students in Northwestern Engineering's Master of Product Design and Development Management (mpd²) program avoid the marketing pitfalls that too often derail well-intentioned products and companies.
Cutler is the new instructor for the program’s Principles of Marketing course. She brings more than 20 years of digital marketing experience to the classroom.
“Marketing today is increasingly technical and data-driven, with a strong emphasis on metrics, measurement, and analytics,” she said. “At the same time, creativity, vision, and storytelling remain critical to developing unique and authentic ideas. The key to marketing is the balance of the art and the science.”
In addition to her familiarity with marketing, Cutler also knows her way around Northwestern. She is the associate director of research at the Spiegel Research Center at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, where she also teaches, along with teaching at the Kellogg School of Management and the School of Professional Studies.
Cutler welcomed the opportunity to add the mpd² program to her Northwestern resume.
“I am interested in the intersection of product development, design thinking, and marketing,” she said. “I look forward to the opportunity to teach at world-renowned McCormick in a prestigious program like mpd².”
That opportunity comes at a key time in the industry. Marketing was once seen in many companies as only a cost-center, the place where money was spent but no return on the investment could be proven.
Digital marketing changed that. Now, a marketing campaign’s success can be easily measured with readily available technological tools for a variety of key performance indicators, from clicks to conversions and a wealth of metrics in between.
Cutler’s career has spanned that transition. In the late 1990s, she worked at the parent company of Apartments.com and Cars.com. Those sites helped turn the newspaper industry on its head by offering advertisers digital proof of the effectiveness of their ad spend, something that couldn’t be done with print.
She also worked at AOL and founded her own digital marketing agency centered on search marketing.
Cutler said she is looking forward to sharing her knowledge with a new group of students.
“Meeting new cohorts at Northwestern has always been exciting,” she said. “I am looking forward to teaching students the fundamentals and best practices for marketing with a focus on digital, analytics, and storytelling.”
The course will explore essential marketing frameworks and give students the opportunity to apply those techniques to products they are developing.
Course projects will cover product, price, place, and promotion – a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, and a customer-decision journey. Students will also learn about customer segmentation and analysis, content strategy, unique selling propositions, messaging frameworks, and elevator pitches, all alongside metrics and measurement.
Cutler said one of the main goals of the course is for students to use what they learn for their capstone project.
“We start with fundamentals and build toward a go-to-market plan,” she said. “Our assessments are designed to provide opportunities for student teams to present and get feedback so they can build a strong final marketing presentation.”
Her hope is that students remain connected to changes in marketing principles as their careers progress.
“Marketing and technology are intertwined and always evolving,” she said. “It’s key to stay in front of this evolution by staying involved in the industry.”