Guidelines to enhance recall and recognition of product placement strategies

Abstract

Product placement is used to break through the marketing communication clutter that viewers are exposed to daily. It refers to the inclusion of branded products into, for example, television programmes or movies. A product placement strategy should be meticulously chosen to enhance the placement’s effectiveness and to live up to marketers’ expectations of conveying the brand message to the target audience, or at least creating awareness of the brand. Product placement strategies include prominence, verbal mentioning of the product, interaction between actors and the product, partial display of the product, and the combination of audio and visual clues pertaining to the product in the placement. This study explored the effectiveness of some of these strategies in creating recall and recognition. By means of the Tobii Eye Tracker device, respondents were exposed to scenes in soap operas, each containing different types of product placement to explore their recall and recognition of the placed products. The findings confirm that product placement has a definite place in the integrated marketing communication mix. The article highlights a number of guidelines by which a marketer or marketing practitioner could improve the likeliness of a placed product or brand to be recognised and be recalled.