Background

Linyun Yang is an assistant professor of marketing at the Darla Moore School of Business. She received her Ph.D. in marketing from Duke University. In her research, she explores how superficial but salient characteristics shape the way consumers navigate the marketplace. Specifically, she studies how readily observable characteristics, such gender or size, are used to make deeper and sometimes unwarranted inferences about people, brands and products.

Recent projects have examined how targeted products elicit the suspicions of people of color, how gender is attributed to humanized products, how a woman’s beauty work shapes perceptions of her moral character, and how a company’s size influences consumers’ expectations of its warmth. Her work has been published in top marketing journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research.

She also advises students in the marketing Ph.D. program and currently teaches consumer behavior to MBA and undergraduate students, receiving an honorable mention for the MBA Elective Faculty of the Year. In the past, she has also taught global marketing and marketing strategy at the MBA and undergraduate levels.

Education

• Ph.D. in marketing, Duke University, 2010
• B.S. in biopsychology and cognitive sciences, University of Michigan, 2005