Ray-Ban and Men In Black.

Product-placement has always been an important strategy for brands and companies. Many movies and TV-shows place products or services for promotional purposes and many researches in this topic have taken place. Most of these investigations have focused on how product-placement affects the audience’s attitude towards purchasing.

Jin, C. and Villegas, J. (2007) carried out an interesting study related to this topic. The experiment was designed to assess the role of prior brand evaluation and how product-placement in humoristic movies affects the viewer attitude toward the product and their purchase behavior.

Subjects were given information about a specific brand and then they were asked to evaluate it. Afterwards, movie segments in which that particular product was placed were shown to the participants. The movie segments were classified in two categories: humoristic or non-humoristic.  Later on, participants were given questionnaires that evaluated their emotional responses to the movie, their attitude towards the product, the brand and their purchase likelihood.

They found out that people who are exposed to humorous movie scenes are likely to have a favorable attitude towards the brand and purchase behavior when they have a positive prior band evaluation.  The authors also suggest that humorous placement is a more effective persuasion tool for those who have negative prior evaluations towards the product than other more traditional ways of propaganda.

            Ray-Ban has been a really used product-placement in movies. In this particular advertisement shown on top, the humoristic movie Men in Black is associated to the brand Ray-Ban as one of the most important characteristic of the main actors are their black Ray-Bans.

            After the big exit of this movie, a campaign was carried out by Ray-Ban in which the two models of sunglasses shown in the movie were advertised.  They try to look for buyers interested in the aesthetics of the main characters of the movie, relating the message of the movie to the product.

Reference:

Jin, C. and Villegas, J. (2007). The effect of the placement of the product in film: Consumers’ emotional responses to humorous stimuli and prior brand evaluation. Journal of Targeting, Measurement & Analysis for Marketing. Vol. 15(4). 244-255.