"Product placement" is a term generally used for the act of paid brand visibility featured in a movie or TV series. However, the consumer is becoming more and more aware of this practice which makes it lose its effectiveness. The latest Jim Carrey movie
"Yes Man" seems to have carried the
Red Bull product placement a bit too far plotting the script of an entire scene around it, and mentioning the brandname several times in a row... OK!!! We understand it was paid for!!! Now STOP!!
That said, what consumers are less conscious about is the
real-life product placement. I have noticed it, because, well, I am a marketing freak. However, this marketing is as subtle as effective.
In my opinion brands like
Rolex have it down to an art: from placing their brand and retail stores in the most fascinating city streets (in Paris, Geneva, Milan...) to associating themselves to monumental items and high-end activities. What actually generated this article is the watch in the middle of down town Beirut. It has a big fat ROLEX logo on all four sides, and this was not the first time I notice a real-life product placement for this brand: at the golf center in Grenoble they had a big branded Rolex watch too. Of course, they also had
Evian bottles (and I was wondering, since this was a mutually beneficial association, how discounted the products were).
This got me thinking about the advertising function. The ultimate aim of ads is to make you familiar with the brand and communicate a positive intuitive attitude towards it. The essence of this would be the strength of the brand recognition factor on our decision making process. This leads me to consider brands like
Siemens, which are widely known, but not specifically for one industry. They've spread out on so many levels. The common ground? A brandname. This big product and services distribution network, although spread on different items, remains, in my opinion, the best marketing strategy. It provides an unintentional
real-life product placement. The brand is familiar. It is recognized. The idea might be ambiguous as to what it represents, but the message and recognition is there. They mass-branded and generated a
branding economies-of-scale effect not by production, nor by cost reduction, but rather by a shared branding initiative. By seeing the brandname and experiencing it, the public is more likely to remember it. The down side is: one bad experience with any of the related products would affect the opinion on all the lines. Thus, I suppose it takes a quality-oriented German engineering firm to pull this off. Kudos.
