CASE: THE MODERATING EFFECT OF INVOLVEMENT IN PRODUCT PLACEMENT EFFECTIVENESS
Xavier Gonzalez Garcia is a Business Administration student at a big, reputable university in England. Xavier loves to play soccer and tennis, he very much enjoys listening to music (he is a big fan of Muse), and he is fond of watching movies. He is a student with excellent research skills as evidenced by his academic record and the quality of his bachelor thesis.
The topic of Xavier's bachelor thesis was "product placement". Product placement has been defined as the marketing practice in which a firm pays to have its branded product included in entertainment media, such as video games, movies, and television programs. This relatively new form of marketing took off in 1982 with the movie E.T., in which the alien is offered a piece of Reese's Pieces. Since then the number of product placements has increased rapidly.
After having spent the summer in his home country - Spain - Xavier has just started with his first year as a master student. During his holiday he has read more research papers on product placement which have further fueled his interest in this topic. Based on these papers and several discussions with his former bachelor thesis supervisor, dr. Casey Finneran, Xavier has decided to take on further empirical research into this issue. He has already discussed a research proposal and the theoretical background of his study with dr. Finneran, who has agreed to help him with this study. Now, he is ready to discuss the design of his study. Xavier has handed in the following outline for an experiment.Research question
How does involvement influence the effect of auditory and visual product placement on brand choice?
Discussion Questions
Xavier has developed a lab experiment to test the hypotheses of his study. In lab experiments, control and manipulation are introduced to establish cause-and-effect relationships between variables in an artificial setting.
1a. Describe how Xavier manipulates the independent variable and the moderating variable in this study.
1b. Although Xavier has pretested the manipulation of product involvement, he has also included a manipulation check for involvement in his study. Why would he have done that?
You have just read an article (Hetherington and MacDiarmid, 1993) that shows that 92% of the chocolate addicts are female. Hence, you suspect that gender is a nuisance factor in this study (recall that candy bars feature in the low involvement movies).
2a. Explain, based on the afore-mentioned research finding, why and how ‘gender' may affect the results of the study if Xavier would not control for gender?
2b. Explain (in detail) possible ways in which Xavier can control for gender in this study.
3a. Which factors affect the internal validity of Xavier's study given the experimental design he is using? Explain.
3b. Are the findings of this study generalizable to other settings (for instance other products), people (consumers in general), and events (product placements in movies or video games)? In other words, how do you feel about the external validity of this study?
4a. Xavier has indicated that he wants to give the participants a cover story. What could be the purpose of this cover story?
4b. Do you think that telling a cover story is ethical? Why not)?