Moviegoers’ response to product placement: a mise-en-scene analysis

Product placement is a form of marketing promotion which is attracting increasing attention from practitioners and academic researchers. To date, most management research in the field has conceptualized product placement in terms of information exposure which accesses semantic memory, ignoring the media context of dramatic entertainment and its potential influence on the meanings of the brand. This paper offers a new conceptualization of product placement as dramatic entertainment. It takes a holistic approach, adapting a mise-en-scene analytical framework from film theory to draw out the potential meanings of the brand within the movie context. The implications for marketing research practice and for interpretive marketing theory are discussed.