Consumers’ perceptions and attitudes toward product placements: exploring similarities and differences between Finland and the United States

Product placements represent the unobtrusive and seamless integration of branded messages within many forms of editorial content (movies, television programs, song lyrics, books, video games). The literature on placements suffers from a United States (US)-centric bias, so this chapter presents a comparative cross-national study about product placements by extending findings reported in Sabour et al. 2016 with a focus on two countries (US and Finland). It proposes and tests a nomological network model that relates consumer attitude toward product placement in general with various antecedents, using structural equation modeling. Measurement invariance is considered explicitly to ensure meaningful cross-national comparisons.