Others Matter: The Effect of Peer Connectedness to Television Series on Product Placement
Effectiveness
Valeria Noguti, University of Technology Sydney1
Cristel Antonia Russell, The University of Auckland Business School 2
1
School of Marketing, University of Technology Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia
Email: valeria.noguti@uts.edu.au
Telephone: +61 2 9514 3260 / Fax: +61 2 9514 3535
2
The University of Auckland Business School, Owen G Glenn Building, 12 Grafton Road, Auckland, New Zealand
Email: c.russell@auckland.ac.nz
Telephone: +64 9 373 7599 Extension 87213
Others Matter: The Effect of Peer Connectedness to Television Series on Product
Placement Effectiveness
There is a growing body of research focusing on the impact on consumers of products
and brands placed in the content of entertainment media such as movies, television series, and
talk shows, a practice referred to as product placement (Auty and Lewis 2004; Babin and Carder
1996; d'Astous and Seguin 1999; Russell 2002; Russell and Stern 2006). Yet, surprisingly little
research has addressed how the social environment affects product placement effectiveness.
Drawing a parallel with research on self-connectedness, defined as the referential relationships
that people develop with television series (Russell, Norman and Heckler, 2004), we introduce the
construct of peer connectedness. We define peer connectedness to television series as the
perceived referential influence of television series on others. In other words, peer connectedness
reflects the degree to which others are perceived as having developed referential relationships
with the series and its characters, and therefore as being influenced by its content, including the
products placed in the series.
Consistent with the extant literature on interpersonal influences in many realms of
behavior, we theoretically propose and demonstrate that peer connectedness contributes
significant explanatory power to predictions of purchase intentions for placed products. As peer
connectedness involves one’s perceptions of what others think and do themselves, the construct
of peer connectedness is akin to Cialdini and colleagues’ notion of descriptive social norms,
defined as individuals’ perceptions of others’ behaviors (Cialdini, Kallgren, and Reno 1991).
As peer connectedness effects on behavior inherently depend on the degree to which
people care about others’ opinions, we further propose that the effect of peer connectedness on
behavior should be greater when the consumer is more concerned about the social environment.
As such, we demonstrate that the effect of peer connectedness on purchase intentions is
moderated by susceptibility to normative interpersonal influence.
One field study was conducted with consumers of a leather goods brand often placed in
Brazilian soap operas. Participants responded to a two-page questionnaire involving brand
attitudes, purchase intentions, perceived peer connectedness and self-connectedness to the series,
susceptibility to normative influences, and demographics. We proposed that peer connectedness
affects purchase intentions by moderating consumers’ willingness to act upon their attitudes
through their concerns with group norms. Indeed, the regression of consumers’ purchase
intentions (PI) on brand attitude, peer connectedness, susceptibility to normative influence (SNI),
and the two-way and three-way interaction terms reveal the predicted three-way interaction. On
the one hand, consumers who held strongly positive brand attitudes but were low in SNI still
report considerably high PI, regardless of perceived peer connectedness. On the other hand, for
consumers who had positive brand attitudes but were high in SNI, PI is affected by peer
connectedness (i.e., higher when peer connectedness is high).
A follow-up experiment conducted with US college students investigated how the
perception of peer connectedness is affected by self-connectedness, and ultimately, how the
resulting perceived peer connectedness affects consumers’ intentions to purchase brands placed
in television series. Viewers of a popular television series participated in an experiment
presented as a set of four separate studies. Attitudes toward a series of brands, including brands
placed in the series, were collected in the first section. After an unrelated study presented in the
second section, the third section focused on participants’ viewing history with the selected TV
series and included a measure of self-connectedness. Participants were then randomly assigned
to a majority or minority peer connectedness condition: explicit information was provided by
stating that either a minority or a majority of other viewers are connected to that series. The
participants’ resulting perception of peer connectedness was then measured. In the final section,
intentions to purchase a series of brands were collected, and SNI was measured. Regression
results showed that, as predicted, the peer connectedness manipulation interacted with
participants’ self-connectedness and SNI to affect perceived peer connectedness. In turn,
perceived peer connectedness mediates the effect of the interaction between the peer
connectedness manipulation and self-connectedness on purchase intentions when SNI is low.
When SNI is high, consumers have stronger pre-existing perceptions of peer connectedness and
are less influenced by external peer connectedness information.
These two studies provide support for the proposition that peer connectedness to
television series is an important factor in predicting consumers’ intentions to purchase products
placed in these series. The field study demonstrates that high perceived peer connectedness
relates to higher purchase intentions for consumers who are more susceptible to normative
influences. The laboratory experiment, in which peer connectedness was manipulated,
demonstrates its causal effects on purchase intentions. Explicit information about peer
connectedness interacts with consumers’ self-connectedness to create a perception of peer
connectedness that significantly predicts consumers’ intentions to buy brands placed in the
series. The resulting perceived peer connectedness mediates the effect when susceptibility to
normative influences is low but not when high. Taken together, our results demonstrate the
importance of incorporating peer connectedness when testing the effects on audiences of product
placements in television series.
REFERENCES
Auty, Susan and Charlie Lewis (2004), "Exploring Children's Choice: The Reminder Effect of
Product Placement," Psychology & Marketing, 21 (9), 697-713.
Babin, Laurie A. and Sheri Thompson Carder (1996), "Viewers' Recognition of Brands Placed
within a Film," International Journal of Advertising, 15 (2), 140-51.
Bearden, William O., Richard G. Netemeyer, and Jesse E. Teel (1989), "Measurement of
Consumer Susceptibility to Interpersonal Influence," Journal of Consumer Research, 15
(4), 9p.
Brewer, Marilynn B., ed. (2003), Optimal Distinctiveness, Social Identity, and the Self, New
York, NY,US: Guilford Press.
Cialdini, Robert B., Carl A. Kallgren, and Raymond R. Reno (1991), "A Focus Theory of
Normative Conduct: A Theoretical Refinement and Reevaluation of the Role of Norms
in Human Behavior," in Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 24, ed.
Leonard Berkowitz, San Diego: Academic Press, 201-34.
Cohen, Geoffrey L. (2003), "Party over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on
Political Beliefs," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85 (5), 808-22.
d'Astous, Alain and Nathalie Seguin (1999), "Consumer Reactions to Product Placement
Strategies in Television Sponsorship," European Journal of Marketing, 33 (9/10), 896910.
Deutsch, Morton and Harold B. Gerard (1955), "A Study of Normative and Informational Social
Influences Upon Individual Judgment," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
(51), 629-36.
Goldstein, Noah J., Robert B. Cialdini, and Vladas Griskevicius (2008), "A Room with a
Viewpoint: Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels,"
Journal of Consumer Research, 35 (3), 472-82.
Johnston, Kim L., Katherine M. White, and Paul Norman (2004), "An Examination of the
Individual-Difference Approach to the Role of Norms in the Theory of Reasoned
Action," Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 34 (12), 2524-49.
Kenrick, Douglas T., Jon K. Maner, Jon Butner, Norman P. Li, D. Vaughn Becker, and Mark
Schaller (2002), "Dynamical Evolutionary Psychology: Mapping the Domains of the
New Interactionist Paradigm," Personality & Social Psychology Review (Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates), 6 (4), 347-56.
Krendl, Kathy A. and Ron Warren (2004), "Communication Effects of Noninteractive Media:
Learning in out-of-School Contexts," in Handbook of Research for Educational
Communications and Technology, Vol. 1, ed. D. H. Jonassen, Mahweh, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 59-78.
La Pastina, Antonio (2001), "Product Placement in Brazilian Prime Time Television: The Case
of the Reception of a Telenovela," Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 45 (4),
541-57.
Nolan, Jessica M. , P. Wesley Schultz, Robert B. Cialdini, Noah J. Goldstein, and Vladas
Griskevicius (2008), "Normative Social Influence Is Underdetected," Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin, 34 (7), 913.
Preacher, Kristopher J., Derek D. Rucker, and Andrew F. Hayes (2007), "Addressing Moderated
Mediation Hypotheses: Theory, Methods, and Prescriptions," Multivariate Behavioral
Research, 42 (1), 185-227.
Russell, Cristel Antonia (2002), "Investigating the Effectiveness of Product Placements in
Television Shows: The Role of Modality and Plot Connection Congruence on Brand
Memory and Attitude," Journal of Consumer Research, 29 (3), 306-18.
Russell, Cristel Antonia, Andrew T. Norman, and Susan E. Heckler (2004), "The Consumption
of Television Programming: Development and Validation of the Connectedness Scale,"
Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (1), 150-61.
Russell, Cristel Antonia and Barbara B. Stern (2006), "Consumers, Characters, and Products: A
Balance Model of Sitcom Product Placement Effects," Journal of Advertising, 35 (1), 721.
Sherif, Muzafer (1937), "An Experimental Approach to the Study of Attitudes," Sociometry, I,
90-98.
Smith, Ted, James R. Coyle, Elizabeth Lightfoot, and Amy Scott (2007), "Reconsidering Models
of Influence: The Relationship between Consumer Social Networks and Word-ofMouth Effectiveness," Journal of Advertising Research, 47 (4), 387-97.
Thompson, Leigh and Gary Alan Fine (1999), "Socially Shared Cognition, Affect, and Behavior:
A Review and Integration," Personality & Social Psychology Review (Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates), 3 (4), 278.