Abstract
Considering the large number of adverts inundating the average consumer every day, the marketing industry is seeking methods to reach clients in a more subtle manner than traditional marketing messages. One such tool is product placement. The article addresses issues of effectiveness of product placement in comparison to a traditional commercial. The objective of the study was to check how participants would recall the content of persuasive messages in conditions of artificially inducted cognitive load (in conditions of traditional advertisement and product placement). Two studies were conducted – a pre-study intended to assess the usefulness of the selected stimuli, and the main experiment. The experiment devoted to this question was planned using an ANOVA scheme 2 (Type of advert: traditional vs. product placement) × 2 (neutral conditions vs. cognitive load). It turned out that the commercial was better retained in neutral conditions than in conditions of cognitive load. The traditional commercial was remembered better than product placement. From the perspective of the study’s ecological validity, of importance is also comparison of retention of brands viewed in a traditional commercial in conditions of cognitive load with retention of brands in conditions of product placement without load. These comparisons indicate the superiority of product placement – brands presented in this manner were more frequently recalled by viewers.
Highlights
Product placement is a widespread form of promoting products and brands on the contemporary market (Galician, 2013; Marchand et al, 2015)
1.489 traditional commercials better than content promoted by way of product placement
The results demonstrated that the mere induction of cognitive load among study participants significantly decreased their capacity to correctly remember the brands presented on the screen
Summary
Product placement is a widespread form of promoting products and brands on the contemporary market (Galician, 2013; Marchand et al, 2015). We start from the premise that during product placement, viewers’ attention is focused on a film, program, weather report, etc., while in the case of a conventional TV advert it is not. We feel that examining the efficacy of these marketing message presentations to viewers should involve comparison of two conditions: (1) effectiveness of product placement in conditions of attention focused on content and (2) effectiveness of a conventional advert in conditions where such focus is absent. This is the approach we propose in this paper to estimating the effectiveness of product placement. The field of psychology (applied psychology in particular) has a long tradition of studies on the effectiveness of recall of advertising content transmitted via various media and in various
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