The Effectiveness Of Brand Placement

Customer perception of a brand is based on how the company positions its brand in the marketing to generate that impression in their minds. This positioning is based on the company’s market position and its competitors’ positions.

According to Keller(1993) the effective brand positioning gives a brand a competitive advantage or “unique selling proposition” that determines a reason why consumers are buying this product or service (Keller, 1993). Similarly, Kay (2004) argues that brand’s strength depends

They start off by informing the reader about product placement by defining how it is the practice of including branded products into films. It also discusses how product placement helps advertisers and film producers.

Over the course of viewing a movie, I keenly focus on real-life brands and companies that are featured throughout each scene. As a founder of a start up brand, I constantly prepare for unique market strategies and creative ideas that can provide the greatest promotion of the product. The use of brands in movies is critical to a company’s day-to-day operations, and it yields extremely high earning potential. Throughout the film Happy Gilmore, both Subway and Wilson are heavily featured in an attempt to spark interest among the consumer. I will be examining the use of Subway and Wilson in the film in an attempt to determine the effectiveness of these product placements in relation to my personal habits as a consumer.

With more and more people being attached to TV shows, movies and technology than ever before, product placement for companies has begun to play a bigger role in their respective advertisement strategies to consumers. A company will often pay a fee to have their product used, demonstrated, or meaningfully presented in a show or movie. Companies are in hope that viewers will take note of the products displayed in the movie or show and think more strongly about using the product themselves. Awareness in product placement began in the early nineteenth century, when brands and products were seen implanted into the narration of novels and has only develop more of an progressively popular area of emphasis (Gurevitch, 2010). The romantic drama “The Longest Ride” is a movie about a cowboy who is a professional bull rider, who falls in love with a college girl, in which they both give up their dreams to make their relationship work.

The effectiveness of brand placement in media outlets are under investigation, which subtle brand placement versus strategic placement are repeatedly compared. Previous theories support that repetition has received a better retention rate in consumer behaviour due to the benefit of allowing consumers to process the brand (Pham and Vanhuele 1997).

The main idea in the article “Product Placement and Advergming” by Michael Solomon is the usage of real products or brands in fictional movies, television shows, and video games and its effects on todays’ growing economy. The first point that the author brings up is that at one time in history the television networks ordered that if a name brand product was to be operated into in any film, it needed to be altered. Solomon gives the example of Melrose Place transforming the name of a cell phone from “Nokia” to “Nokio”. However, in today’s media world there is a widespread variety of name brands incorporated into the networks. Sometimes companies pay billions of dollars to get recognition and other times they just get lucky with free advertisement. Correspondingly, the author states that now- a- days it is so common to see products

It has been acknowledge (Romaniuk & Sharp 2004) that Brand salience can be defined as the propensity of the brand to be thought of by buyers when they are in a buying situations. A brand awareness strategy depends on how well known the brand is, Brand Salience is forming image to refresh their memory about the brands that can linked to consumer mind as well as the quantity and quality of the cue to brand links (Olson & Peter 2005), it is very important that consumer can connect to their mind as many cues as possible . The level of consumers’ brand awareness necessary to induce purchase varies depending on how and where they make their purchase decision for that product category or form. The brand attitude is focus on evaluating the brand, according to Schiffman and Kanuk (2007) “attitudes are relevant to purchase behavior are formed as a result of direct experience with the product, word-of-mouth information acquired from others, or exposure to mass-media advertising, the internet, and various forms of direct marketing”

Turcotte (1995) distinguished visual only (the appearance of the product, service, brand name or logo), audio only (the authors in the programme report the product, service, brand name or logo) and combined audio-visual (showing a brand and at the same time mentioning the name of the brand or conveying a brand-relevant message in audio form). For example, Tom Cruise discusses the quality of an Apple computer in a movie and starts working on it. Gupta and Lord (1998) propose that any of those three modes can be prominent or subtle. Prominent placements are placements where the product (or other brand identifier) is central to the action in the scene or where the product is made highly visible by size or virtue and/or position on the screen. Subtle placements are opposite cases, here the product is either a background prop outside the main field of visual focus or lost in an array of multiple products or objects, low time of exposure or just small of size. Babin and Carder (1996) found evidence of brand recognition in films whereas the research of Gupta and Lord (1998) is more fine-tuned; they found a higher recall of the brand after prominent product placements than after subtle product placements. Brennan et al. (1999) found that brand recognition increases with 43.92% after being

Cinema gives a powerful environment in which to advertise. The film being shown virtually identifies the target audience and makes it very easy to schedule and buy advertising spots to match brand message to potential consumers. Better still, the audience is completely captive and in a receptive frame of mind as they wait to be entertained. A well organized media plan based closely around the films being shown can be a highly effective way of communicating brand messages to a willing audience. In-film advertising is very much alive and kicking.

The main objective of this paper is to compare the effectiveness of subtle and prominent product placements with the effectiveness of 30-second commercials for the same brands. Two experimental groups were exposed to TV- drama series and 30-second TV commercials in the break of the

Positioning is the process of designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the minds of the target market (Kotler and Keller, 2006). Scientists Etzel, Walker and Stanton (1997) refer positioning as the management’s ability to bring attention to a brand and to differentiate in its favorable way from similar products in different brands. However, Ries and Trout (1986) emphasizes that positioning is not what is done to product/brand, positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. According to Vukasovic (2009), the positioning of a brand is ultimately depends on the consumer, and how they perceive the overall quality, attributes, value, price, and image of the brand. In short,

Earlier companies use to concentrate on making a brand image is to only entice new customers but these days theories have turned around. Maintaining the brand has become one of the prime targets’ for marketing professionals in order to gratify existing customers.

These articles can be found from various business magazines, trade journals, academic publications, and the Internet and they offer a great number of insights about product placement, interviews and comments from various product placement professionals and some research results on the feasibility and effectiveness of product placement along with audience attitudes (Nebenzahl&Secunda 1993; d’Astous&Séguin 1999; d’Astous&Chartier 2000; Gould et al. 2000; Gupta et al. 2000; Law & Braun 2000). Other research papers are also available ranging from brand recognition and recall studies to media effect factors and further to e.g. image management studies (Babin& Carder 1996; Brennan et al. 1999; Sandler &Secunda 1993; Bennett 1999; Meenaghan& Shipley 1999; Ferrand& Pages 1999). The majority of magazine articles handle the issues about the alliances in the product placement business as well as the individual companies' experiences as in a form of case studies illustrating both the success stories as well as the failures in product placement. The practical elements of product placement gained from the variety of articles and publications will be complemented with primary research data received from some of the companies used as case examples at the end of the paper (Grollman 2001; Wallace

In recent times, branding has played a pivotal role in some brands’ success. This has been made possible through the ability of some marketers to capture the essence and minds of people (consumers), and put the trends and characteristics into the personality of a brand. Customers have always found ways to identify themselves with certain products, and on several occasions, branding campaigns