The Effectiveness of Product Placement in a Virtual World

Only recently the marketing literature has the topic of unconscious memory processes and the role these processes play in influencing consumer decision making been studied. Several researchers have reported priming/implicit memory effects. That is, a change in behavior due to a prior exposure without a deliberate attempt to recollect the prior episode. Janiszewski (1990, 1993) reported positive and reliable effects of exposure on brand evaluations and liking (implicit measures), even when participants failed to recognize having seen the brands (explicit measure), suggesting stochastic independence between the two measures. Furthermore, although the experimental manipulations (testing delay, attention) were found to significantly impact the explicit measure, they left the implicit measure untouched. These results provide evidence that incidental exposure to advertising or brand names can influence subsequent consumer behavior in a variety of ways, some of which fall outside the consumers’ awareness. Taken together, these results add to the conclusion that implicit tests of retention measure a form of knowledge (or exposure effects) different from that tapped by standard, explicit tests. More important, these findings confirm that the explicit-implicit distinction is relevant for research on product placement effectiveness. Duke and Carlson (1993) and Krishnan and Chakravarti (1999) claimed that even think to buy something could be a conscious and unconscious act, especially when the consumer is actually making his decision to buy the product. Also Law and Braun (2000) discovered that PP influences not only the explicit but also the implicit memory. In a very famous test they asked to participants to imagine helping a friend in purchasing new item for a new flat. They found out that persons were choosing the same items they saw in the episode of Seinfeld watched just before the task. They claimed that basically PP might prime the brands, which influenced the later decision like purchasing (Yang 2004). Through the exploratory study word-fragmentation test has been applied to assess the implicit memory (Duke 1995). Implicit processes seem to play an important role for brand placement, because brands are integrated into the editorial content (Neijens, and Smit, 2007). Especially when brands are subtly placed, implicit processing is likely to be activated because attention is drawn to the editorial content, and not to the brand itself (Schneider and Cornwell, 2005). If it’s so for the traditional adv. we can easily imagine how it could be in an effective and immersive environment such videogames where the involvement is constantly high.