A survey as well as an experiment was conducted to study the effects of television brand placement on brand image. The studies showed that the integration of a brand into the editorial content of a program had a significant effect on brand image: As people watched more episodes, the brand image became more in agreement with the program image. These results confirm the applicability of learning and human associative memory theories to brand placement. Another important finding is that brand memory and brand image were not related. Thus, brand image became more positive regardless of viewers' memory of the brand placements, which implies that brand image was implicitly affected. This has important theoretical implications for the understanding of the working of brand placement. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Brand placement, the intentional incorporation of a brand into editorial content, is a fast-growing practice in today's television programming (Law & Braun, 2000). It is even predicted that within three or four television seasons, as much as 75 percent of all prime time scripted shows on U.S. television will include some element of brand placement (Consoli, 2004). Brand placement offers advertisers a potentially successful alternative to traditional advertising because the advertiser's message is integrated within the editorial content, which avoids the problem of consumers avoiding commercials (Roehm, Roehm, & Boone, 2004 brands are placed in advantageous, natural, and credible contexts that offer advertisers a unique opportunity to add favorable associations to their brands (Karrh, 1998). Although a considerable number of studies on brand placement have been conducted, the effects on brand image remained unstudied. This is very surprising, because image change is often mentioned as one of the benefits of brand placement for advertisers (DeLorme & Reid, 1999;Karrh, 1998). Knowledge of the effects on brand image is not only useful for advertisers but also is needed to build a theoretical framework of the working of brand placement. The hypotheses in the present research are based on both psychological and advertising theories, which explain the mechanisms that underlie effects of mixing advertising with editorial content. Thus, the present study focused on brand image and seeks to explain possible effects by human associative memory theory.Another important variable in the effects of persuasive messages is repetition (Krugman, 1972;Zajonc, 1968Zajonc, , 2001Zielske, 1959). Because brand placements are forms of persuasive messages, repetition is likely to play a role in placement effects as well. No studies, however, have focused on the effects of frequency of exposure to brand placements. Therefore, exposure frequency was also examined. In sum, the effects of repeated exposure to brand placement on brand image were studied.
LITERATURE ON BRAND IMAGEEffects of brand placement on brand image, the perceptions of a brand as reflected by the brand associations held in consumer memory (Keller, 1993, p. 3), ar...