Product Placement in Advertising

The job of brand managers of established brands is to reinforce and maintain their position – to defend their mental accessing advantage. The job of challenger brands is to use whatever means they can to try to force themselves higher on the agenda and erode the inherent advantage of the leading brands.

It is an advantage that is not confined to mental agendas but also affects the order in which we notice things in cluttered displays. Sure, shelf height and the amount of shelf space are important but hold those constant and you find the order and speed with which packs are noticed is heavily affected by brand familiarity. Packs compete to be triggered into the conscious mind and we notice them one at a time, the order being affected in turn by how often we are exposed to them. The exposure may be in advertising, in TV programs, in movies or in-store.

Clearly product placement is a powerful and increasingly popular marketing tool that is now in a feeding frenzy. It is only a matter of time before all this provokes a backlash and that is now beginning to happen. From country to country in Europe, the attitude to it ranges from indifference to outright ban. In Ireland and Finland it is totally illegal. Ethical moral and legal questions are now being asked and critics in the USA are petitioning federal regulators to crack down.

Last week (10 Feb 05) in an opening skirmish in the USA, the Federal Trade Commission ruled against requiring an identification message like "advertisement" be superimposed whenever a product placement occurs. However Commercial Alert, the Ralph Nadar inspired watchdog group, still has a request pending for a full investigation into product placement by the Federal Communications Commission.

By Max Sutherland

Dr. Max Sutherland’s column is published monthly and posted on the web at www.sutherlandsurvey.com. Receive an advance copy by email (free subscription). Max Sutherland is author of the book 'Advertising & the Mind of the Consumer’ (published in 8 languages) and is a registered psychologist. He works as an independent marketing consultant in Australia and USA and is also adjunct Professor at Bond University.