Preparing For Product Placement
Marketing and advertising are a big work field where so many companies around the world walk around to understand client behavior. In this article, we will introduce the idea of marketing in videogames.
This topic will be the main topic of my first five articles in this blog. We can understand as a videogame, a big network that allows to the player to move around a virtual world. In so many cases, big companies like Coca-Cola, Heineken, Visa, Google, Nescafe, Disney, Ikea, Santander, and McCormick and more invest in videogames advertisement. Nowadays, the videogame is an opportunity for companies to create a brand idea and to analyze the behavior of the customers. Drinking a beer in the bar a Polar beer or a coke, and to interact with the bartender paying for the drink or food or any kind of product or asking for the.
We describe this proses as product placement. “Product placement refers to the “practice of including a brand name product, package, signage or another trademark merchandise within a motion picture, television or other media vehicles for increasing the memorability of the brand and for instant recognition at the point of purchase” (Panda 2004, p. 1).
Some examples of product placement in video games include Pizza Hut and KFC in Crazy Taxi and AXE and Nokia in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. While product placement in cinema and television is usually both visual — screen placements — and auditory — script placements, product placement in video games is mostly visual, this is, in the shape of banners and billboards placed in the arena or nearby. Visual screen placements can be manipulated to increase brand recall and brand recognition.”
We can understand product placement like the border of advertisement and marketing and communication. Śliwińska and Pacut defined in 2011 the following types of product placement: “generic placement, utility placement, brand placement, corporate placement, and organization placement.” Generic placement takes place when the product category is placed, without any information about the brand or producer. Utility placement shows ways how the product should be utilized. Brand placement is when the brand and/or product is featured. Corporate placement can be described by the company name or brand of the product featured on billboards, neon signs or other advertising media. Organization placement takes place when an organization or company is embedded in the plot (Hofman-Kohlmeyer, 2017).
In some ways, we get the idea that product placement is a secondary activity that the player does when they play. We know that a player that has chosen a character or like we call it a “avatar”, depending on what kind of game is the player needs to complete some task and get a reward or on the other side to be punished. So, it is an activity that allows to player resolve problems and develops brain capacities like number thinking, strategic thinking, patient, collaboration, and moreover. But in this way the player interacts with brand information that it is keeps it by repetition and by recognition of the company brand an ideology. “We assume that brand familiarity can act as an orienting response increasing the attentional capacity for those placed brands consumers are familiar with. The orienting answer has been previously used in product placement research in a video game context in the form of animated logos, which elicited a higher recall than static logos. “(Martí-Parreño, José, 2016)
“Message repetition is considered a key factor in media planning with implications for advertising effectiveness not only in traditional media like radio and television (Singh and Cole 1993) but also in new media like the Internet (Huang and Lin 2006). While the literature on repetition in traditional media can be traced back to the 70s and 80s (Berlyne 1970; Calder and Sternthal 1980) more research is needed to better understand the effects of repetition. “(Martí-Parreño, José, 2016)
I think this could introduce some topics in marketing that we will continue in the next articles like customer behavior, repetitions in videogames, the influence of the videogames and movie tourism destinations, and advertisement in videogames.
References
Martí-Parreño, José, et al. “Product Placement in Video Games: The Effect of Brand Familiarity and Repetition on Consumers’ Memory.” Journal of Interactive Marketing, vol. 38, Elsevier Inc, 2017, pp. 55–63, doi:10.1016/j.intmar.2016.12.001.
Magdalena Hofman-Kohlmeyer Hofman-Kohlmeyer. “DETERMINANTS OF EFFECTIVE PRODUCT PLACEMENT IN COMPUTER GAMES — LITERATURE REVIEW.” CBU International Conference Proceedings .., vol. 6, Central Bohemia University, 2018, pp. 181–86, doi:10.12955/cbup.v6.1153.