The Research On The Effectiveness Of Product Placement In The Network Game Context

The traditional communication way has lost its effectiveness to connect with target consumers directly. Consumers are tired of traditional ads to zap it. In the meanwhile, it's extremely urgent for company to find out an alternative to link up with customers more effectively, the product placement is going to to be a popular substitution. On the other hand, the network game becomes more and more popular. The paper explores effectiveness of product placement in a network game.In the past researches, many researchers analyze the relationship between the type of product placement and its communication effectiveness in terms of prominent product placement and subtle product placement. The paper researches this through the concept of plot placement and non-plot placement. This study investigates what the different types of product placement impact on the effectiveness and the brand, and tests the relationship between consumer's attitudes towards the network game/game role and the brand. Besides, there is a moderator variables, age, which to be considered into the influence to the effectiveness of product placement.The purposes of this study are: (1) Investigate the impact of different types of product placement on the effectiveness of product placement. Are different age groups supposed partially to have impacts on the effectiveness of product placement? (2) Investigate the impact of different motivation of the game on the effectiveness of product placement. (3) Will the consumers'attitudes toward the product place, the network game and the roles of network game positively influence their attitudes toward the brand and their buying intention?The main results in this study are as follows:(1) The paper researches the relationship between the type of product placement and the effectiveness of product placement by experiment. And the result is that the plot placement generates higher recognition and better attitude than the non-plot placement, and then generates their buying intention.(2) The paper researches the relationship between the motivation of game and the effectiveness of product placement by questionnaire. After doing the factor analysis, the paper got four main motivations of game, entertainments, achievements, social learning and avoiding. The result shows that the player out of the motivatin of entertainment has higher brand recognition. The player out of the motivatin of achievement has higher brand recognition.(3) The relationship between the placement attitude and the effectiveness of product placement is also proved in the paper. Consumers'attitudes toward the product placement, the network game and the roles of the game positively affect on the brand attitude.(4) In the junior high school student group, the recognition difference between the plot Placement and the non-plot placement is not significantly greater than college student group. On the contrary, it is less than college student group.(5) The brand recognition varied as the different network game experience.