The Impact Of Prominence On Audiences’ Memory For Product Placement

Although there is a lot of disagreement over the effectiveness of product placement in academia,product placement is experiencing rapid growth currently in the China.A majority of researchers believed that prominent placements bring higher audience memory and better brand attitudes than subtle placements do.However,it can be bad even worse when placement is too prominent.Literature review showed that the previous research findings were separately based on some specific dimensions of placement prominence.In fact,multiple dimensions of placement prominence simultaneously exist and exert considerable influence on audience memory,and different level of the specific dimension may have different contributions to audience’ memory.For this reason,we generalize prominence to five dimensions: placement modality,exposure duration,exposure frequency,placement location and placement size,and set two levels to each dimension.By employed orthogonal experimental design,we got eight combinations of the five dimensions with two levels each.Then we used theater methodology to make videos which the product was placed in accordance with the combinations.A between-subjects design and conjoint analysis empirically to examined relative importance of five dimensions of prominence to audience memory and utilities of different levels of each dimension.334 students were invited to participate in the experiment.The results indicate that relative importance of five dimensions of prominence to audience memory ranged from high to low are placement modality(32.17%),placement location(19.87%),exposure frequency(17.17%),exposure duration(15.99%)and placement size(14.80%).Higher level of each dimension has greater impact on audience memory than low level does except exposure duration.The impact of placement location on male audiences’ memory is significant,and the impact of placement modality and exposure frequency on female audiences’ memory are stronger than other placement dimensions do.All dimensions of prominence have no significant impact on memory when audiences are familiar with the brand placed,placement modality and exposure frequency have significant impact on memory when audiences are unfamiliar with the brand placed.The impact of each dimension on audience memory for product placement is also examined under the different audience characteristics such as movie watching frequency and awareness of product placement.The conclusions suggest that the advertising practitioners should mix the dimensions of placement prominence reasonably to gain satisfying brand memory effectiveness when they issued a product placement,instead of just pursuing the highest degree of prominence,which may not only waste money but also lead to negative brand attitudes.Rapid growth of the product placement market definitely brings intense competition,our findings demonstrate that the impact of each dimension of prominence on audience memory could be totally different because of individual difference.To promote effectiveness of product placements,advertisers should integrate characteristics of placement and audience to segment the market of product placement,and upgrade the effectiveness of advertising communications.