A Pattern Of Activation In Memory Of Product Placement

Advertising practitioners generally regard brand recall as an important indicator of placement effectiveness.But excessive pursuit of brand memory by competing with media content for audience's attention is a reversal of the order of host and guest,which not only tears from product placement the mask of unobtrusiveness,but also interferes with the fluency of audience's entertainment experience,and finally,impairs the artistic nature of film and television work itself.The key to gain the benefit of product placement is whether consumers can recall the bridge between brand and media content beyond the entertainment media,especially in purchase decisions.But the research on memory retrieval is relatively poor.Currently,stimulus-response model is mostly used in the study of product placement memory,and the relationship between stimulus and memory is tested experimentally.But the information processing inside the consumer's mind is still considered a “black box”.According to spreading activation theory from the cognitive psychology area,memory is stored in network form,noticed elements in the network are sources of activation,and activation can spread from these elements to associated elements.This infers that memory performance can be improved by offering cues closely associated with specific memory.Based on the nature of product placement,propositional network theory and spreading activation theory were used to analyze how audience form product placement memory network and what factors influence memory retrieval.Specific product placement memory network was formed by movie-viewing experiment and then activated by recall and recognition task.Verbal report method was used to collect all the information that the subjects recall.31 subjects participated in the test and 130 thousand words of verbal report were finally obtained.The findings show that:(1)The Pattern of activation in memory of product placement is mainly set up around plot and actors.The nodes of the pattern of activation can be classified into two categories,according to their content,plot information node(actor node,actor's location node,action node and story association node)and placed information node(brand or product name node,brand logo node,brand or product feature node,brand association node,brand or product's location node,node of relationship between product and actor);They also can be classified as exogenous node and endogenous node according to the source of memory during encoding process.(2)“Leading actor-relationship-Brand” is a main proposition in the pattern of activation.Leading actor node can be used as a main retrieval cue,which is the key to make a bridge across movie and brand.(3)The higher the level of prominence and brand familiarity,then the higher the level of memory activation;used-by-main-character placements and story-connected placements lead to higher level of memory activation than background placements.The design of product placement should follow the principle of double clues.Link the brand or products with media content that audience willing to retain and retrieve,at the same time make sure the placed information can activate the brand name.