Towards a better understanding of practitioners’ ideas about product placement: an empirical analysis in the Italian context

Abstract

Product placement is an increasingly essential technique in marketing communications. The majority of previous contributions, however, focused on investigating the product placement impact on consumers in the various entertainment contents. In this article, we focus on practitioners' ideas about the practice. Specifically, we carry out a survey in the Italian context by replicating and extending previous seminal studies conducted in the USA. Replication studies are essential for practitioners to be more confident when applying theoretical insights to their ordinary activities. Findings provide some preliminary insights about the product placement industry in Italy, which is less developed and more linked to the film industry than the product placement industry in the USA. Managerial implications and suggestions for future research are presented at the end of the article.

Exploring Practitioners’ Views on Product Placement: What can Taiwan Learn from the West

“…The previous product placement studies have been examined from three scopes: the content, the consumers, and the practitioners. According to Gistri and Corciolani (2020), research on product placement practitioners can be grouped into industry-focused studies and practitioners' ideas and practice studies. Industry-focused studies mainly examine how product placement deals have been arranged in a specific context, describing the involved actors, their roles, and the relationships among them.…”

“…Given this, understanding these fundamental actors' updated views related to the practice of product placement is essential. However, the practice in which professionals outside the US execute product placement has hardly been examined thus far (Gistri & Corciolani, 2020).…”

“…Most entertainment products, for example, TV programs and films made in the U.S., are distributed worldwide. The dominance of the U.S. in product placement decision-making and best practices suggests that the U.S. placement practitioners would have considerable global influence (Craig-Lees et al, 2008;Gistri & Corciolani, 2020).…”

“…In Taiwan, the research on product placement is majorly focused on consumer attitudes and effects measurement. The practitioner's viewpoint on product placement is generally not studied sufficiently (Gistri & Corciolani, 2020). This study, therefore, makes a hypothesis that Taiwanese placement marketing practitioners should learn from Western content production, understand their culture, why they do what they do, and, most importantly, how they do it without affecting the audience's rights to content enjoyment, and at the same time not damaging the sponsored brand, or encourage better attitudes towards it.…”

Exploring the impact of brand placement repetition on the effectiveness of umbrella branding

“…brand attitudes) is important as a high level of awareness and a strong brand image should lead to a product being selected by consumers (Keller, 1993). In fact, changes in brand recall, recognition and brand attitudes are commonly used to determine brand placement effectiveness, both in academic research (Boerman et al , 2021; Chan, 2012; Eagle and Dahl, 2018) and industry (Gistri and Corciolani, 2020; Karrh et al , 2003).…”