CASE: THE MODERATING EFFECT OF INVOLVEMENT IN PRODUCT PLACEMENT EFFECTIVENESS

Xavier Gonzalez Garcia is a Business Administration student at a big, reputable university in England.
Xavier loves to play soccer and tennis, he very much enjoys listening to music (he is a big fan of Muse),
and he is fond of watching movies. He is a student with excellent research skills as evidenced by his
academic record and the quality of his bachelor thesis.

The topic of Xavier’s bachelor thesis was “product placement”. Product placement has been defined
as the marketing practice in which a firm pays to have its branded product included in entertainment
media, such as video games, movies, and television programs. This relatively new form of marketing
took off in 1982 with the movie E.T., in which the alien is offered a piece of Reese’s Pieces. Since then
the number of product placements has increased rapidly.

After having spent the summer in his home country – Spain – Xavier has just started with his first year
as a master student. During his holiday he has read more research papers on product placement
which have further fueled his interest in this topic. Based on these papers and several discussions with
his former bachelor thesis supervisor, dr. Casey Finneran, Xavier has decided to take on further
empirical research into this issue. He has already discussed a research proposal and the theoretical
background of his study with dr. Finneran, who has agreed to help him with this study. Now, he is
ready to discuss the design of his study. Xavier has handed in the following outline for an experiment.

Introduction

Many researchers in the marketing field have examined the effect of product placements on
memory, attitudes, and behavior. These studies have shown that product placements affect brand
recall, brand recognition, and consumers’ attitudes toward the brand. The current study aims to
investigate the moderating role of product involvement on the effects of visual and auditory product
placements on brand preferences. The results of this study build on prevailing knowledge in
marketing and help marketing practitioners who want to place their product in a movie, television
program, or video game to decide whether they should do this visually or auditory.

Research question
How does involvement influence the effect of auditory and visual product placement on brand
choice?
Hypotheses
Hypothesis 1: Auditory product placements are more effective for high involvement products than
for low involvement products.
Hypothesis 2: Visual product placements are more effective for low involvement products than for
high involvement products.

Method
Participants. The sample will consist of 80 to 100 university students. These students are divided into
four groups, with 20-25 students per group. The participants are randomly assigned to one of the
experimental conditions.
Design. The study has a 2 (visual versus auditory product placement) x 2 (high versus low product
involvement) experimental design. Participants are told a cover story; they are told that the goal of
this study is to evaluate whether brand choice depends on the mood people are in. They are
informed that mood is manipulated by a video clip, which will be either funny or sad.
Manipulations and manipulation check. Four short movies have been selected for the experiment,
with four types of product placements. Each participant will only see one of these movies. One of the
following movies will be shown to the participants of the study: (1) visual product placement of a low
involvement product (a candy bar); (2) visual product placement of a high involvement product
(sneakers); (3) auditory product placement of a low involvement product (a candy bar); and (4) an
auditory product placement of a high involvement product (sneakers). The short movies will all come
from episodes of the television show Seinfeld. To ensure that the involvement manipulations (candy
bars versus sneakers) elicit the intended amount of involvement, this manipulation was carefully pre-
tested with a separate sample of 77 respondents. What’s more, a manipulation check of involvement
is also included in the study. Involvement is measured with a 7-point, multi-item scale adapted from
Zaichkowski (1985). The scale is introduced with the following question: “How involved are you with
this brand?.”
Control variable. Because the product placements in the four video clips differ in terms of prominence,
we will control for band prominence. Prominent placements are those in which the product is made
highly visible by virtue of size or position on the screen or its centrality to the action in the scene.
Subtle placements are those in which the brand is not shown prominently, for instance, small in size,
a background prop outside the main field of visual focus, lost in an array of multiple products or
objects, or low time of exposure (Gupta and Lord, 1998). Following Gupta and Lord, brand
prominence is measured with a 7-point, multi-item scale.
Dependent variable. Brand preference is measured by providing the respondents with a shopping list.
The shopping list mentions twelve product categories (including those under study) and the
participants are asked to pick one of the brands from each product category. They are instructed to
act like they will need an item from each product category in the near future.

Questions

Xavier has developed a lab experiment to test the hypotheses of his study. In lab experiments,
control and manipulation are introduced to establish cause-and-effect relationships between
variables in an artificial setting.

1. Discuss the principles of control and manipulation.

2a. Describe how Xavier manipulates the independent variable and the moderating variable in
this study.
2b. Although Xavier has pretested the manipulation of product involvement, he has also included
a manipulation check for involvement in his study. Why would he have done that?

You have just read an article (Hetherington and MacDiarmid, 1993) that shows that 92% of the
chocolate addicts are female. Hence, you suspect that gender is a nuisance factor in this study (recall
that candy bars feature in the low involvement movies).

3a. Explain, based on the afore-mentioned research finding, why and how ‘gender’ may affect
the results of the study if Xavier would not control for gender?
3b. Explain (in detail) three possible ways in which Xavier can control for gender in this study.
4. Discuss the type of experimental design that Xavier is using.
5a. Which factors affect the internal validity of Xavier’s study given the experimental design he is
using? Explain.
5b. Are the findings of this study generalizable to other settings (for instance other products),
people (consumers in general), and events (product placements in movies or video games)?
In other words, how do you feel about the external validity of this study?
6a. Xavier has indicated that he wants to give the participants a cover story. What could be the
purpose of this cover story?
6b. Do you think that telling a cover story is ethical? Why (not)?
7. Imagine you are dr. Finneran. Draft a reaction to Xavier’s outline.