Recent trends such as ad skipping have led to the adoption of alternative promotion strategies in reaching target audiences. Brand placement (BP), the inclusion of brands into entertainment with an attempt to persuade, is an increasingly common tactic used by marketers. Academic research has had a hard time keeping up with practice and has primarily focused on cognitive effects, viewing BP as another form of advertising. A few empirical studies have considered alternative theories for explaining BP effects in light of its unique entertainment setting. These studies show complementary nonconscious effects such as implicit memory and implicit attitude and find that explicit measures do not mediate effects on implicit measures, but lead to negative attitude effects. To date, however, no study has looked at how brand associations are learned from BP.
To fill this gap, this dissertation adopted the implicit learning framework from cognitive psychology. Implicit learning suggests that even complex information can be learned 1) without awareness of what is learned, 2) without intention to learn, and 3) as a byproduct of some explicit learning. A total of 725 subjects were recruited to participate in three separate experiments conducted to investigate the effect of awareness on implicit learning and explicit learning in three different settings: across marketing communications, within BP, and across BP-advertising sequences. Measures assessed viewer learning of four of the nine brands embedded in the film I, Robot after viewing either the entire film or an edited clip. Learning was also used to explain conventional measures such as brand memory and brand attitude.
Key findings show that 1) brand associations are learned differently in the BP and advertising contexts, 2) prominence may actually deter implicit learning within BP, and 3) there are interactive effects when BP and advertising are used together. Persuasion knowledge was found to be a useful covariate when looking across marketing communications, but not within BP. Implications for both theory and practice are derived.