Jennifer Chang Coupland

Color portrait of Jennifer Chang Coupland

Clinical Professor

Department Marketing
Office Address 445 Business Building
Phone Number 814-865-0577
Email Address jxc75@psu.edu

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Jennifer Chang Coupland is Clinical Professor of Marketing in the Smeal College of Business Administration. She joined the Penn State faculty in 1998 after receiving her Ph.D. and M.S. in Marketing at Northwestern and a B.S. in Business Administration at UC Berkeley. She has taught MBA Marketing Management (Northwestern), MBA Brand Management, Honors Marketing, Advertising, Principles of Marketing, and the Penn State Prime Brand Management & Campaign Strategy Practicum. Dr. Coupland received the Fred Brand, Jr. Excellence in Teaching Award in 2021, the Dillwyn P. Paiste Fellowship in 2010, and the Paiste Excellence in Teaching Award in 2007. She is also the faculty advisor for Penn State Prime and the marketing honors advisor to the Schreyer Honors College.

Dr. Coupland's research focuses on consumer behavior and brand meaning in households and grocery stores. She specializes in qualitative methods including ethnography, interviews, focus groups and projective techniques. Her work has been published in the J. of Consumer Research, Psychometrika, International J. of Research in Marketing, and Advances in Consumer Research, and she appeared in a BBC documentary on the science of shopping. Earlier in her career, Dr. Coupland worked as an account executive at O'Brien Communications in Del Mar, California and as a visiting professor at Jordan McGrath Case & Partners Advertising in NYC. She has also lived in England, where she thoroughly enjoyed assimilating to the consumer culture.

Expertise

Consumer Behavior, brand meaning, symbolism, food consumption, qualitative research

Education

Ph D, Marketing, Northwestern University, 1998

MS, Marketing, Northwestern University, 1996

BS, Business Administration, University of California, Berkeley, 1993

Courses Taught

MKTG 301 – Prin of Mktg (3)
Focuses on customer behavior, product, channels of distribution, promotion, and pricing with emphasis on a culturally diverse environment.

MKTG 422 – Adv/Sales Pro Mgmt (3)
Perspectives and models of the key decisions involved in managing advertising and sales promotion campaigns.

MKTG 494H – Research Project (Variable)
Supervised student activities on research projects identified on an individual or small-group basis.

MKTG 495A – Penn State Prime (3)
Penn State Prime is designed to give students hands-on, practical experience between brand ("client side") and ad agency ("agency side") while taking on a real consumer marketing challenge. Teams live out the journey from client-agency initial engagement, consumer insights to campaign development. In doing so, students apply skills developed in departmental workshops, marketing-related coursework, and other relevant experiences. Unlike traditional courses, students adopt specific roles on the client or agency side, and receive mentorship from a client or agency executive, teaching assistants, and the instructor. The goal of the practicum is to enhance and refine each student's ability to excel in the future by experiencing the real-world challenges and "messiness" of brand management and advertising in a semi-guided context.While a traditional course design would focus on specific aspects of client side and agency side topics such as brand, advertising, and promotion management, Penn State Prime's project team environment gives students the opportunity to utilize real-world exposure to pull content together.

MKTG 497 – Special Topics (3)

MKTG 497D – **Special Topics** (3)

MKTG 301H – Principles of Marketing (3)
Focuses on customer behavior, product, channels of distribution, promotion, and pricing with emphasis on a culturally diverse environment. Not available to students who have taken B A 303.

B A 303H – Marketing (2)
Junior Core Marketing - Honors Section.

B A 303 – Marketing (2)
Introduction to customer behavior and research, service/product development, pricing and promotion in diverse and international marketing contexts.

MKTG 494 – Research Project (variable)
Supervised student activities on research projects identified on an individual or small-group basis.

MKTG 496 – Independent Studies (variable)
Creative projects, including research and design, which are supervised on an individual basis and which fall outside the scope of formal courses.

MKTG 596 – Individual Studies (variable)
Creative projects, including nonthesis research, which are supervised on an individual basis and which fall outside the scope of formal courses.

MKTG 532 – Brand Management (2)
To examine and understand the processes of building, designing, measuring, and maintaining brand equity.

Selected Publications

Desarbo W., Fong D., Liechty J. C., Coupland J. C., "Evolutionary Consumer Preference/Utility Functions: A Dynamic Perspective." Psychometrika, no. 70, 2005
Coupland J. C., "Invisible Brands: An Ethnography of Households and their Kitchen Pantries." Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 32, 2005
Coupland J. C., "The Revival of Projective Techniques: Past, Present and Future Perspectives." Advances in Consumer Research, vol. XXVIII, 2001
Coupland J. C., Roth W. E., "When is Cranberry Sauce Shaped Like a Can?: An Investigation of Cultural Capital, Gender and Consumption in Television Programming." Association for Consumer Research Conference on Gender, Marketing and Consumer Behavior, 2000
Iacobucci D., Henderson G., Marcati A., Coupland J. C., "Network Analyses of Brand Switching Behavior: The Ehrenberg Automobile Data." Networks in Marketing, (Sage Publications), 1996
Iacobucci D., Henderson G., Marcati A., Coupland J. C., "Network Analyses and Brand Switching Behavior." International Journal of Research in Marketing, vol. 13, 1996

Research Impact and Media Mentions

"History of the Marketing Department Video", Penn State Marketing Facebook Page, Internet
"Buyology: The Science of Shopping", BBC and The Learning Channel, Television

Honors and Awards