The role of brand awareness and product involvement on choice and recall in the context of product placement

Product placement has been attracting attention in recent years due to marketers seeking new tools to reach consumers that have become more emancipated due to the development of adskipping technologies like TiVo which helps audiences skip commercial messages. Nevertheless not much work has been done in exploring and testing the real efficacy of product placement as a marketing communication tool. Following the integrative conceptual model proposed by Balasubramanian, Karrh, and Patwardhan (in press) to understand how such messages generate audience impact, we further explore the role product involvement and brand awareness play in influencing consumers in the context of product placement in movies. We focus on two different effects: brand recall (cognitive) which is most widely used to assess the efficacy of product placement investments and brand choice (behavioral). We discuss our findings and point out some managerial implications for marketers based on our findings.