Jennifer Chang Coupland
Clinical Professor
Program Coordinator
Program Coordinator
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 Dillwyn P. Paiste Excellence in Teaching Award in 2007, the Paiste Fellowship in 2010, and the Fred Brand, Jr. Excellence in Teaching Award in 2021. She is the faculty advisor for Penn State Prime, marketing honors advisor to the Schreyer Honors College, and currently serves as Assistant Department Head. 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 in Marketing, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 1998-05-01 MS in Marketing, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 1996-01-01 BS in Business Administration, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 1993-01-01
Courses Taught
B A 303 – Marketing
Introduction to customer behavior and research, service/product development, pricing and promotion in diverse and international marketing contexts.
B A 303H – Marketing (H)
Junior Core Marketing - Honors Section.
MKTG 301 – Prin of Mktg
Focuses on customer behavior, product, channels of distribution, promotion, and pricing with emphasis on a culturally diverse environment.
MKTG 301 – Principles of Marketing
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.
MKTG 301H – Honors Mktg (H)
FOCUSES ON CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR, PRODUCT, CHANNELS OF DISTRIBUTION, PROMOTION, AND PRICING WITH EMPHASIS ON A CULTURALLY DIVERSE ENVIRONMENT.
MKTG 301H – Principles of Marketing (H)
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.
MKTG 422 – Adv/Sales Pro Mgmt
Perspectives and models of the key decisions involved in managing advertising and sales promotion campaigns.
MKTG 422 – Advertising and Promotions Management
An applied and theoretical understanding of integrated marketing communications. New to the course this year is Photoshop and greater focus on digital marketing.
MKTG 422 – Advertising and Sales Promotion Management
Perspectives and models of the key decisions involved in managing advertising and sales promotion campaigns.
MKTG 494 – Research Project
Supervised student activities on research projects identified on an individual or small-group basis.
MKTG 494H – Honors Thesis (H)
Supervised student activities on research projects identified on an individual or small-group basis.
MKTG 494H – Research Project (H)
Supervised student activities on research projects identified on an individual or small-group basis.
MKTG 495A – Penn State Prime (A)
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 496 – Independent Studies
Creative projects, including research and design, which are supervised on an individual basis and which fall outside the scope of formal courses.
MKTG 497 – Special Topics
Formal courses given infrequently to explore, in depth, a comparatively narrow subject which may be topical or of special interest.
MKTG 497D – **Special Topics** (D)
MKTG 532 – Brand Management
To examine and understand the processes of building, designing, measuring, and maintaining brand equity.
MKTG 596 – Individual Studies
Creative projects, including nonthesis research, which are supervised on an individual basis and which fall outside the scope of formal courses.
Selected Publications
Coupland J. C. "Invisible Brands: An Ethnography of Households and their Kitchen Pantries" Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 32, 2005-01-01
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, 2000-01-01
Honors and Awards
Fred Brand, Jr. Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award, George and Beverly Brand McTurk, (2021-08-31)
Paiste Fellow in Teaching and Learning, Dillwyn P. Paiste, III, (2010-01-01)
Paiste Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, Dillwyn P. Paiste, III, (2006-07-01)