The popularity of the Korean entertainment industry has been growing worldwide. Various forms of media, such as movies, TV series, music, radio and many more, have been used as a platform to launch and promote new products of many brands. For instance, Laneige – a Korean cosmetic company was successfully placed in the Korean drama – Descendants of the Sun. Previous studies have accounted for various factors in analysing product placement in movies, such as brand familiarity, brand fit, and movie genre. However, the effect of the emotional context of where the product is placed remains unclear. The purpose of the present research is to investigate whether the effectiveness of product placement is influenced by the emotions depicted in the scene, and whether the ethicality of the product matters.

The success of Marvel movies attracts more companies to place their brands in this series of movies, apparel brand like Under Armour or car manufacturer like BMW has largely used the movie as medium of product placement to increase brand equity. To understand how the product placement in the movie affect consumer attitude and purchase intention is in needed. Neer (2004) states that product placement is a type of marketing by creating impression for consumers unconsciously through incorporation into the plot of TV programs, movies and other media. The conceptual model was built based on the Russell’s (2002) tripartite typology of product placement and social comparison theory. We presume brand-self congruity, placement explicitness, plot connection, and attitude toward the plot and role are positively related to brand attitude and purchase intention. The research employed experiment with a 2 (placement explicitness: prominent/subtle) x 2 (plot connection: main character/supporting role) between subject design. The research theme is under the Under Armour because the brand used product placement as the company’s major marketing communication process of move placement. The research result shows that the more the product placement is identifiable in the movies, with frequent usage or appearance in main plot, the better the placement effect is; the preference of consumers on movies, including plot and role attitude, explicitly influences placement effect. If the real self or ideal self of consumers are consistent with brand image, a higher brand attitude and purchase intention will occur. To best of our knowledge, our paper is first one using self-congruity and attitude toward the plot to investigate the outcome of product placement in the movies. The research concludes with implications for promotion strategy to advance brand image and purchase intention by increasing the effectiveness of product placement. Future research suggestions relevant to the product placement issues, marketing communication and brand management are also provided.

Similar to traditional advertising, product placement plays important roles in consumer purchasing behaviors through the AIDA model (e.g., Ghirvu，2013) of which attention is the very first stage. While there is an established literature on brand recall and recognition as methods of product placement evaluation, the role of attention, which is an important topic in traditional advertising research, has been sparsely studied in the context of product placement. This paper proposes that attention is a psychological state which affects information selection and processing. Captured attention reflects audience’s selective attention to editorial content including placements, while sustained attention (or processing) requires allocated attentional capacity to process information captured from the placement. When available attentional capacity is insufficient, product placements cannot be adequately processed to form accurate memory (Lee & Faber, 2007). Accordingly, this paper aims to investigate the pathway of ‘placement characteristics –audience attention – audience memory’ in order to reinterpret the relationship between placement characteristics and audience memory through the lens of attention. We do this by answering two pertinent questions: 1) how placement characteristics (e.g., exposure duration, frequency, location and size) influence captured attention; and, 2) how captured attention and sustained attention affect audience memory. To do so, we draw on psychology literature, especially the feature integration theory (Treisman & Gelade, 1980), in establishing the theoretical connections between placement features, captured attention, sustained attention and memory. By a theatre methodology, we found sustained attention mediated between captured attention and audience memory, while more prominent placement characteristics had stronger relationships with captured attention. Furthermore, audience’s levels of involvement in the media content and familiarity with the placed brand moderated the relationship between sustained attention and audience memory.

A factorial design 2 (high repetition vs low repetition) x 2 (high brand familiarity vs low brand familiarity) is used to test the effects of repetition and brand familiarity on consumers’ memory for brands placed in video games. Consumers recalled better familiar brands and repetition increased recall for familiar brands.

Two studies of luxury product placement in a movie examine whether luxury placements increase movie viewers’ purchase intentions when backgrounds are congruent with the product’s luxury image (a message factor) and when the audience’s luxury associations are activated at the moment (an audience factor). In Study 1, participants’ luxury associations are implicitly activated by priming them with perceptions that they are members of high or low social classes. In Study 2, to explicitly activate their luxury associations, some participants read a news article that describes the placed luxury product as a genuine high-end product; others read an article that describes the placed luxury product as a discount brand. Both studies demonstrate the effects of product–environment congruence and luxury associations on consumer purchase intention.

In the years 2010–2012 in Italy, the 3F sectors, fashion, food and furniture, marked a +5% (FinanciaLounge, 2014). To some extent, this rise may rely on the strong Made in Italy label that is historically “perceived by consumers as being associated with “true” luxury goods” (Hoffmann & Coste-Manière, 2014) and, in order to create nostalgia and credibility for their brands, many firms try to correlate their offer to the heritage of the Country of Origin (Fionda & Moore, 2009). In the academic literature, Country of Origin is one of the most analyzed method to enhance a firm’s competitive advantage, mainly thanks to its ability to increase positive perceptions about firms’ products in the customers’ mind (Agrawal & Kamakura, 1999; Aiello et al., 2009). Moreover, Country of Origin is defined as “the effect rooted in consumers’ images of the quality of specific products marketed by firms associated with a country of origin” (Verlegh, Steenkamp, & Meulenberg, 2005, p. 127). COO works as an information cue that covers the attitudes toward the products evaluation. In particular, COO influences customers’ brand awareness, perceived quality and brand associations depending on the country image, and, as a consequence, the overall brand equity (Agrawal & Kamakura, 1999; Chao, 1998; Magnusson, Westjohn, & Zdravkovic, 2011). For instance, some authors showed a positive bias (i.e. increased willingness to pay a higher price) toward products from some countries relative to others (Drozdenko & Jensen, 2009). For this reason, just few countries can benefit from their image and awareness in order to take advantage from the Country of Origin effect, such as Italy. Furthermore, besides the Country image, scholars found that the COO effect can vary depending on the product category “For a given category, country-of-origin credibility is high when consumers have a favorable image of the country’s products in that category, and low when the product–country image is unfavorable” (Verlegh et al., 2005, p. 129). In this perspective, firms should identify solutions to convey positive associations about their supply to customers (Phau & Leng, 2008). The relevance of this issue is confirmed by a lot of studies, where some communication tools related to COO effect are already investigated, like brand identification system, packaging, advertising copy and celebrity endorsement (Agrawal & Kamakura, 1999; Usunier, 2011). Actually, a lot of Italian firms use product placement exploiting the “Made in Italy” effect, where placement is here intended as the paid inclusion of branded products within mass media programming (Karrh, 1998). Just few examples are Piaggio with Vespa in Roman Holiday, Bacardi with Martini in James Bond and Ocean’s series, Riva Yacht with Aquarama in James Bond series and The Great Beauty, and Prada in The devil wears Prada. Many reasons are explaining such a great use of product placement. On one hand, in the last decade we have assisted to the fragmentation of media and their audience, and on the other one, consumers are more and more skeptical towards traditional benefit advertising and they use technology to avoid commercials (Hackley & Tiwsakul, 2006; Lehu & Bressoud, 2009). Integrating brands casually but notably in a media content appears to be an interesting alternative to traditional marketing communication tools (D’Astous & Chartier, 2000). Furthermore, product placement’s acceptance and its possibly effectiveness, as well as country of origin effect, is likely to vary across product category (Gupta & Gould, 1997; Russell, 1998). Moreover, we can assume that product placement impact on the overall brand equity in a positive way (Aaker, 1997; Miniero, Chizzoli, & Pate, 2013) as it is an effective tool that can increase brand awareness and develop favorable relations with customers (Chan, 2012). In particular, studies on product placement confirm an increased top-of-mind-awareness and unaided awareness of placed brands (Cholinski, 2012). Finally, even if studies on product integration effect on attitude toward placed brands are not univocal, a lot of publications present positive or at the very least neutral product placement influence on brand attitude (Russell, 2002). For instance, according to Miniero et al. (2013), product placement is a nice way to achieve communication objectives and it can be used to influence consumers’ attitude and intention to buy a specific brand (Miniero et al., 2013). To our knowledge, despite a huge employment of product placement in practice and a lot of contributions in the academic theory about these two topics, there is a gap in the literature about the relationship between the COO effect and the use of this communication tool from a practitioners’ perspective. On the contrary, from a consumers’ perspective, Tsai and Lu’s research find out a positive correlation between the use of product placement and the country image (Tsai & Lu, 2012). Moreover, due to the several studies concerning the positive impact of product placement and country of origin on brand equity, we are allowed to suppose that professionals can synergistically take advantage from both. Starting from Karrh’s studies on the practitioners’ perspective about product placement, our research aspires to draw any analogy and difference between Karrh’s findings and the Italian firm’s perceptions (Karrh, McKee, & Pardun, 2003; Karrh, 1995, 1998). Particularly, we aim to interview companies that belong to sectors where Made in Italy represents a key competitive component. In addition, our study attempts to explore if and how independent Italian firms exploit country of origin effect in their product placement in order to increase their brand equity. To answer our research questions, we could properly use the case study method (Yin, 2009). This qualitative methodology is very useful to explore unanticipated empirical discoveries (Eisenhardt, 1989). Our case study protocol will provide the analysis of three different data sources. In the first stage of our research, we will examine audio-visual materials, such as film, videotapes, websites and social media, to collect data in an unobtrusive method. In the second stage, we will go through public documents, newspapers and recent academic literature to understand trend topics on product placement and COO and to arrange guidelines suitable for the interviews. In the third ones, we will conduct in-depth face-to-face and semi-structured interviews with key figures of Made in Italy firms that integrated product placement in their communication mix at least once. More in details, interviews will be recorded and transcribed to ensure the completeness of the information gathered. Through the triangulation of these methods and sources we will achieve a richer and deeper data collection and we will also make the case study more detailed (Creswell, 2009). Although our research is still in progress, we expect to extend Karrh’s findings about product placement. More in details, we would like to focus our attention upon the integration between COO and product placement and we try to highlight any key element that can explain how to manage this relationship in order to increase brand equity.