At the first session of the Kellogg School of Management’s Influencer Marketing course Fall Quarter, an influencer self-dubbed as “the Vagina Whisperer” arrived as the guest speaker.

The Vagina Whisperer, who is pelvic floor physical therapist Dr. Sara Reardon, has gained over 700,000 Instagram followers by creating content on women’s pelvic floor health. She was visiting the class, co-taught by Kellogg Prof. Tim Calkins and Kellogg Prof. Linda Kim (Kellogg ’08, McCormick ’99 ) to give a talk and Q&A.

“I think students were surprised that our first speaker would be the ‘Vagina Whisperer,’ right?” Calkins said. “It’s an unexpected influencer to begin with, but I thought it was fabulous, because what it spoke to was how there are all these communities around these social networks.”

The course explores different ways brands work with influencers in order to capitalize on their audiences, Kim said. 

Over the span of five class sessions — once a week for three hours each — the curriculum covers why influencers are important, where they fit in with which brands, in which ways companies partner with them, how to create an influencer marketing campaign step-by-step and risks of influencer marketing, Kim said. 

“It’s such a different way to do marketing,” Kim said. “It’s a totally different approach from the old model of spending months developing a piece of advertising. This couldn’t be further from that.”

Influencer Marketing has been offered at Kellogg before, in 2022 and 2023, but this is the first time Calkins and Kim teamed up to teach their rendition. All 70 seats were filled at the start of the quarter with more students on the waitlist, Kim said.

Students in the class come from various backgrounds, Kim said. Asked at the beginning of the quarter, none indicated being influencers by profession, but a few said they dabbled in content creation.

As a PwC manager, second-year MBA candidate Connor Blaul does not do any marketing at his day job. But he runs a social media handle called Stem & Plate with his girlfriend, which has over 3,000 followers on Instagram and a few hundred on TikTok, posting cooking, travel and lifestyle content. 

“The goal of me taking this class is to learn more about how organizations and firms are starting to use influencers to get their products to market and to actually increase sales, but I also have a selfish self-interest to learn more about it for our own kind of influencer page,” Blaul said. 

Second-year MBA candidate Isha Khanna, who is co-president of Kellogg Marketing Club, said that in her case, the course may overlap with her career.

For five years before she started at Kellogg, Khanna worked in communications and business administration at Mastercard, despite her undergraduate major being marketing. She was excited to pivot to study marketing at Kellogg. 

Khanna plans to return to PepsiCo after interning there over the summer, this time in a brand manager role. 

“In my undergrad university, there were no such courses like influencer marketing there,” Khanna said. “(That’s) a testament to just how at the frontier of marketing Kellogg really is.”

The professors’ expertise is a highlight of the class, Blaul said. Kim is the senior director of marketing retention and lifestyle at Lululemon, and Calkins had a lengthy career at Kraft Heinz before transitioning to teaching.

Calkins said that ultimately, Kellogg is proactive at encouraging new and relevant courses to keep up with market trends. Influencer marketing is just one of those examples; artificial intelligence is another.

“If the course goes well, I think we’ll certainly hope to do it again,” Calkins said. “The thing about creating a course is it’s a lot of work the first time you teach a class, but each time it gets a little bit easier. So if the class goes well, hopefully we’ll come back and we’ll do it again and make it a regular part of the core curriculum.”

Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Reardon’s name. The Daily regrets the error.

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