UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. –– Karen Page Winterich first became interested in consumer behavior as a teenager while working as a grocery store cashier in her hometown.
“Some people would use coupons, and some people would shop sales, and some people would buy the same exact thing every single time,” she said. “I was just kind of fascinated, thinking, as I'm checking people out, ‘why do people do these different things?’”
Today, as the Gerald I. Susman Professor in Sustainability and professor of marketing in the Penn State Smeal College of Business, Winterich’s research and her teaching both focus on influencing consumers’ sustainable behaviors. She was recently named a distinguished professor for 2026, joining current Professors Arvind Rangaswamy and Linda Trevino and Professor Emeritus Russell B. Barton as Smeal faculty to receive the distinction.
“It's a huge honor that really signals that the people I respect also respect my work,” Winterich said. “Our research is our passion, and feeling recognized by other people that I respect is really humbling, but rewarding at the same time.”
A trendsetter within the marketing discipline
“Karen has been at the forefront of the sustainability research area within marketing for probably the last decade or so,” said Meg Meloy, professor of marketing and chair of the Department of Marketing. “She was among the very first to create curriculum that spoke to sustainability not only here but among our peer and aspirant schools. She has really developed that area and made it a focal point for the field.”
Winterich came to Penn State in 2010 as an assistant professor of marketing after spending three years in a similar role at Texas A&M. Her early work focused on consumer behavior when it came to donations, but one paper she had written on green consumption values caught the eyes of Barton and then-Dean Charles Whiteman, who asked Winterich to develop a course on sustainable behavior as part of the college’s growing sustainability initiative. That course, "BA442: Sustainable Behavior of Consumers, Firms, and Societies," has become a popular elective for students, who typically fill the class quickly during registration.
“I tell my students that the traditional consumer behavior model is acquisition, consumption, disposition,” she said. “We've spent decades and decades of research on acquisition, how many people acquire, acquire, acquire, acquire. And the disposition, for decades, was ignored. We didn't care about disposition, because that came after the acquisition and consumption part. And I think sustainability has a lot to do with disposition, or slowing down disposition, or what happens after the initial disposition. ... I feel like my research took a shift from my teaching, which is not necessarily how it normally goes, but it really did, I think, in this case.”
As her course gained notice, Winterich’s research interest into sustainability in marketing grew. She has published papers on sustainable retailing, how showing people what happens when they recycle can increase recycling rates and how psychological biases can deter consumers from taking action to mitigate climate change.
“The issues that she addresses are along the lines of getting consumers to think differently about their purchases in a way that promotes sustainability,” said Steven Huddart, Smeal Chair Professor of Accounting and the senior associate dean for research and faculty. “It’s definitely a marketing topic but one that has real relevance today, and something that you might see at a university but not generated in other contexts, such as a corporate environment.”
Forging sustainable collaborative partnerships
Winterich has conducted numerous field studies on campus, donning hazmat suits to comb through residence hall trash cans and working with the Office of Physical Plant to weigh trash and recycling after football tailgates. She’s taken her class on field trips to the Centre County Recycling and Refuse Authority, and each year her class partners with a business — most recently Redyoos, a recycled jewelry company, and Organic Climbing, which makes custom climbing gear — or a nonprofit to examine how that organization could improve their sustainability marketing strategy.
“There are all sorts of partnerships that have arisen because of that strong sustainability presence in the business school to the College of Agricultural Sciences and the Huck Institutes for Life Sciences and other units within the university that also were taking on sustainability as a major initiative trying to get people to increase their awareness of sustainability issues,” Meloy said. “Karen’s been involved in all of that effort. She’s done a remarkable job in terms of shaping how we think of being sustainable.”
Winterich has also earned distinction with the American Marketing Association’s (AMA) academic council, serving as the council’s president from 2023-24, as co-editor of the AMA’s Journal of Marketing Research since 2023, and currently on the AMA Board of Directors. She recently attended a conference in Madrid, Spain, and said she was pleased to see the efforts she and others on the council have made to make the organization more inclusive bear fruit; there were attendees from 47 countries at the conference.
“I think we're really broadening,” she said. “We want to be the big tent for marketing, where we have strategy researchers, behavioral researchers and quantitative researchers, all your academic interest areas, and bring people together.”
Influencing the next generation of marketing researchers
Hannah Smith, a doctoral candidate in marketing, is among the students who have been inspired by Winterich’s passion for sustainability. In her first year of doctoral studies, she published a paper on style durability — the idea that to build a more sustainable wardrobe, consumers need to purchase clothing that isn’t only physically durable but won’t go out of style quickly — and credited Winterich with helping her at every step of the process, from idea generation to research to publication.
“It was the first time I’d written an academic paper, so lots of help in changing the language we were using and the writing styles,” Smith said. “I previously ran a couple of experiments at a previous institution, but she was helpful in assisting almost a first-time researcher with what experiments are, how you run them, what is required to remove confounds, how to have conditions, and then of course the whole analysis procedure.”
Winterich, the inaugural Susman Professor, said she has been motivated by his support and by her current and former students, several of whom have reached out to congratulate her on the distinguished professor honor, including a student from her first semester of teaching at Penn State in 2010.
“Hearing from the students, that they remember the class and it was a good experience is the most, I'd say, most impactful, most meaningful feedback that I can receive,” she said.