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THE EFFECTS OF BLOG PRODUCT PLACEMENT TYPE AND SOURCE CREDIBILITY ON THE ATTITUDES TOWARD PRODUCT PLACEMENT IN TAIWAN.

Yu-Hsiu Chiou*

Department of Marketing Management, Takming University of Science and Technology No.56, Sec. 1, Huanshan Rd., Neihu District, Taipei City, 11451, Taiwan yhchiou@takming.edu.tw

Ming-Hui Chen

Department of Marketing Management, Takming University of Science and Technology No.56, Sec. 1, Huanshan Rd., Neihu District, Taipei City, 11451, Taiwan

Li-Shia Huang

Department of Business Administration, Fu-Jen Catholic University, 510, Chung Cheng Rd, Hsinchuang City, Taipei 24205, Taiwan

Li-Rong Huang

University student, Takming University of Science and Technology No.56, Sec. 1, Huanshan Rd., Neihu District, Taipei City, 11451, Taiwan

Shih-Ru Hu

University student, Takming University of Science and Technology No.56, Sec. 1, Huanshan Rd., Neihu District, Taipei City, 11451, Taiwan

*Corresponding Author

ABSTRACT

The 65% surge in the sales of Hershey’s Reesee’Pieces within a month after it’s placement in the film E.T. drew the attentions and budgets of the promotion communities on the product placement activity. In Taiwan, the leading weblog—Wretch provides its own product placement method called “chameleon”, which allows the bloggers to use product picture as the background of their own weblogs. Besides, one famous blogger ever recommended one book on her weblog. As a result, 261 books are sold through the Internet bookstore in three days. It was regarded as a successful case of Blog marketing. This study explores the type of product placement and discusses the effects between types of product placement on the Blogs and the source credibility. This study tests the hypotheses by using 2 (types of Blog product placement—background picture vs. text) * 2 (levels of expertise—low vs. high) *2 (levels of attractiveness—low vs. high) factorial design. 412 respondents who had ever browsed Internet participated in the survey. The results of t-test showed that when the product placement was conducted in text form, the effect of placement was more significant than the formation of background, while level of confidence in the blogger’s expertise has no significant impact on the placement effect. A more attractive layout of the weblog was positive to brand attitude, product attitude, and purchase intention but had no significant impact on the brand memory.

Keyword: Blog, Product Placement, Source Credibility, Placement Effects

INTRODUCTION

The 65% surge in the sales of Hershey’s Reesee’Pieces within a month after it’s placement in the film E.T. drew the attentions and budgets of the promotion communities on the product placement activity (Karrh, McKee & Pardun, 2003). According to Avery and Ferraro (2000), 61% of brands appeared in the TV programs, including news, sports, and feature magazine programs, are for the purpose of advertising explicitly or implicitly. Product placement is truly becoming a popular trend.

Since 2002, Blog has become a fashion around the world. Hyperlinks between Blogs form Blog-communities and Blog-communities build up a new social network. According to the estimation by Technorati, there are 175 thousand of new Blogs emerging everyday worldwide. Business Next (a leading Internet magazine in Taiwan, 2007/5) says that there are 70 million Blogs worldwide, producing 58 thousand articles per hour, or 1.4 milliones per day. The amazing influence of Blog continues to be deepened and the growth rate expected to be high. For Internet users, Blog has become part of the daily.

As Blog gaining more popularity, Blog occupied part of the life of the Internet user. Previously, the research on product placement defined the placement as the insertion of the product in either motion media, such as movies, TV shows, drama, news, or music video, or static media, such as newspaper or magazine. However, on the Blog, a newly-emerged media, the placement of product or brand is different. When the bloggers use the background, which is provided by the website(such as Wretch), or when the bloggers mentioned the product or brand name in their photo album or logs, the website or the product doesn’tpay for the placement. This research intended to discuss the marketing placement in Blog. In summary, the purposes of this research are discussing the method of placement, text or background, and the placement effect, including brand memory, brand attitude, product attitude, and purchase intention. In addition, this research analyzes the impact of source credibility on placement effect.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Definition and Types of Product Placement

According to the definition by Balasubramanian (1994), product placement is “a paid product message aimed at influencing movie (or television) audiences via the planned and unobtrusive entry of a branded product into a movie (or television).”Now, product placement can be executed in lots of media, including music videos, radio programs, songs, video games, plays, novels, and print media (Gupta & Gould, 1997; Gupta & Lord, 1998; Hart, 2003).

Gupta and Lord (1998) propose an approach with two dimensions to classify the type of product placement — mode of presentation (visual only, audio only, audio-visual combination) and the level of prominence (prominent vs. subtle). Researches proposed that the type of placement would have impact on audiences’reactions (d'Astous & Seguin, 1999) such as recall and recognition (Gupta and Lord, 1998).

Russell(2002) also revealed that the recall of audience may differ under different placement type and the way the products were linked to the plot. The Vollmers’(1995) research also discovered that the brand recognition may be affected by the placement method in the movies.

Development of Blog and the implementation of Blog placement

According to a survey conducted in 2006 by InsightXplorer, a marketing research agency in Taiwan, 70% of individuals under the age of 24 in Taiwan have their own Blog. And nearly 20% of the bloggers constantly update their contents on the Blogs. In addition, a lower proportion of the respondents over the age of 30 have Blogs but still about 30% of these people will go to visit other people's Blogs. Most Blogs in Taiwan are used for the purpose of personal writing. Commercial applications or business internal communications are also emerging. New applications such as mobile Blogs are also developed, but a clear business model is still lacking.

Our observations found that the most common placement method in Blogs are background placement, such as the Chameleon Function of Wretch, and text placement, such as the blogger share their own experiences. Now we would detailed those methods as follows:

A. Text placement

Bloggers wrote down their experiences and thoughts in the Blog and the trustworthiness of the bloggers makes them the reliable source of the internet users and Blogs tend to draw users with the similar interests to become the reader of the Blog, making the bloggers the opinion leaders in the Internet. In this research, the text placements are defined as followed: in viewing the Blogs on the internet, the content was the article or collection of information on a specific topic by the blogger. The content could be condensed as a memo or as the snapshot of the bloggers life.

B. Background placement

The Chameleon Function of the Wretch could replace the default background with the material of a specific product or brand, making the website looks like a site belongs to the product, deeply reminding of the brand, and creating the advertising images or attitude even the user didn’tclick the banner while avoiding noise information. In this research, background placements are defined as follow: In viewing the Blogs on the internet, using the Chameleon Ads as the background and influencing the information receiver with the placement by the bloggers.

Definition and effects of source credibility

Ohanian(1990, 1991) concluded the opinion of various scholars and stated that trustworthiness, expertise, and attractiveness are the important criterion for credibility. The research demonstrated that source with high credibility could have better persuasiveness than that of low credibility would (McGinnies, 1973) and source with high credibility could bring in more the positive attitude to the receivers than that of low credibility would. (Craig & McCann, 1978; Woodside & Davenport,1974)

A. Expertise

Ohanian(1990) stated that the expertise is the advocator has the professional ability to comment on the product. As a communicator, whether the advocator has expertise matters to the decision of consumers. Also, in the research we discovered that expertise matters more to the purchasing intention than attractiveness or trustworthiness.

B. Attrativeness

Chaiken(1979) discovered that attractiveness has to affect the liking of the information receiver toward broadcaster before it affects the persuasion. Also, popular broadcasters are more likely to persuade people than unpopular broadcasters. The attractiveness of the communicator would affect the alteration of opinion, product assessment, and other measurement. The positive attitude would increase as the attractiveness and the use of the product, service or social motives would enhance the attractiveness(Joseph 1982).

The effects of product placement

Product placements are one of the advertising campaigns. The purpose of advertising is to inform and to alter the attitude of consumers toward product. Recently, the researchers recognize that consumer’s attitude toward the advertisement would affect the attitude toward products or brands. In other words, consumers tend to generate positive brand attitude and purchase intension toward the advertisement they like. (Ho, 2000)

A. Memory

Memory refers to the ability to recall the massage after watching the advertisement once. Since the purpose of advertisement is to sell, the product must leave some impression before purchase behavior thereafter. The advertisement that cannot be remembered would not be recalled at the subsequent time point when the purchase decision is made. Therefore, whether the consumer could remember the advertisement is one of the measurements of the effectiveness of advertisement.

B. Attitude

Krech, Crutchfield, and Ballachey(1962) thought that attitude is the human recognition, assessment, emotional experience, and behavior tendency toward specific things or value. Fishbein & Ajzen(1975) thought that attitude is a predetermined stance of a continuous and either positive or negative reactions that is acquired through learning. Makeachie & Doyle(1968) though that attitude is the combination of concepts, belief, motivations, or habits related to a specific object. Schiffman & Kanuk(2000) thought that attitude is a mental tendency through learning and is a long-lasting assessment toward things. Kotler(1991) thought that attitude is a long term judgment, emotional feelings, and behavior tendency of like or dislike toward object of concept.

The importance of brand attitude is the proxy for researcher to estimate the purchase intention and behavior of consumers. Kotler(1991) depicted that the better attitude of an individual hold toward a brand, the more likely he would use the product. On the other hand, the less positive attitude, the less likely he would use the product.

In the measurement of advertisement effect, the attitude the consumer hold is a good indicator of whether or not he would purchase the product in the future. The purpose of marketing personnel is to persuade the consumer to hold a positive attitude to a product and to establish a better image to the consumer. (Mackenzie, Lutz, and Belch 1986;Shimp 1981)

C. Purchase Intension

Purchase intension refers to the degree to which the consumer was stimulated by the advertisement and the likelihood of purchasing a specific product or brand. (Belch & Belch, 1999) In the process of decision making of consumer, there are definition of problem, information collection, alternatives assessment, the formation of purchasing decision, and the post purchase process. (Hawkins, 2001) Therefore, the formations of purchase intention are the match of motivation and the product characteristics. This involves personal process such as the integration of motivation, awareness, and attitude. If we look into the advertisement communication level, the intention is at the later level of this process.

RESEARCH METHOD

The main purpose of this study is to explore the effects of the types of product placement on the Blogs and the source credibility on the attitudes toward brand and product in Blog. This study tests the hypotheses by using 2 (types of Blog product placement—background picture vs. text) * 2 (levels of expertise—low vs. high) *2 (levels of attractiveness—low vs. high) factorial design. The conceptual model of this study is established as Figure 1.

Because the main purpose of this study is to discuss the influence on the results by the type of Blog product placement and the resource credibility. It may be required the bloggers should be famous but neutral to avoid the possible outcome that the results are distorted because he is too popular or too much disliked. In this study, we use the Blogs of beautymaker KEVIN and gourmet Agtip as examples while making some modification on the background and text appropriately and selecting the product placed based on their respective expertise.

Two independent variables were manipulated in this study. One is “types of Blog product placement”, including background picture and text. The other is “source credibility”, including expertise and attractiveness. The former is the bloggers’level

of expertise in the Blog product placement from the viewpoint of Blog reader (the information receiver). It was measured by 4 items, including (1) experts knowing the product; (2) the expertise to evaluate the product; (3) knowledge of product features;

(4) qualificaion to endorse the product. The later is defined as the Blog reader regards the level of attractiveness about Blogs’layout and contents. It was measured by 6 items, including (1) the layout makes people feel intimate; (2) the layout is friendly;

(3) the content is attractive; (4) the layout is attractive; (5) the layout makes people feel comfortable; (6) the Blog looks popular.

Four dependent variables are measured in this study. “Brand memory”was defined as the level which the browsers can remember the brand or the product information after Blog product placement. “Attitudes toward the brand and product”were defined as the respondents’favorable or unfavorable manner toward the experimental materials. The definition of purchase intention in this study is the willingness that browser wants to buy the specific product presented in the experimental condition after browser reads the Blog. We measure all dependent variables with seven-point Likert scales, where 1 represents strongly disagree and 7 represents strongly agree.

We put our questionnaire on a website and sent the invitation to some bloggers and the used snowball sampling to invite more Internet users. 412 respondents who had ever browsed Internet participated in the survey. The questionnaire was divided as five parts. The first part of the questionnaire was about the brand memory. The second part was about the attitude toward brand and product. The third part was about purchase intention. The fourth part was about resource credibility. The last part was some demographics questions and Internet-browsing behaviors. We used one-way ANOVA to test our hypotheses.

RESULTS

Among the 412 effective samples, 54.1% of the respondents were female. 71.1% of the samples are between 19 and 24 years old. According to www.twnic.net.tw, most of the Internet users are between 20 to 24 years old. So the sample of this research is representative of Internet people. 75.5% of the respondents also have their own Blogs. Most of the bloggers are Wretch users(57.5%). While most bloggers are maintaining their photo album(44.9%) and logs(44.7%). The males and the females did not show significantly different patterns on all of the measures.

TheCronbach’sαofeachvariance is greater than .80, suggesting good reliability. The results of one-way ANOVA are listed in Table 1.

Table 1 ANOVA of Blog product placement

The impact of the type of Blog product placement

According to table 1, the means of brand memory, brand attitude, product attitude and purchasing intension under text placement are all higher than those under background placement ( H1-1 5.0149 > 4.5119 H1-2 5.2438 > 4.9921 H1-3 5.0121 > 4.2654 H1-4 4.9739 > 4.0924 ) and all p-value are less than 0.05 which are statistically significant. This study’s results show that different types of product placement will affect the placement effect. And the effect of text placement is better than that of background placement. Consequently, H1 is supported.

The impact of the expertise

According to table 1, when the blogger is high professional, the means of brand memory, product attitude, and purchase intension are not higher then the means when the blogger is low professional (H2-3 4.4976 < 4.7657 H2-4 4.3840 < 4.6650). Besides, the p-value of H2-1 is not significant. So H2 is not valid. This study shows

that the blogger’s expertise is not significantly impacting brand memory and brand attitude.

There are two reasons to explain why H2 is not supported. First, the viewers’major motives are not to look for products or the product information. Because the Blogs are not as commercial as the internet shopping. Consequently, it will not construct the indicators to browse the Blog and thus it will not affect the brand placed or the effects. Second, the research adopts the celebrity. Most people think these celebrities have a larger contact network and absorb more and the most updated information. Thus they believe the restaurants they mentioned in the Blog should contain credibility and fame. And they believe these restaurants and product are worth purchasing, but forgot to think carefully whether the Blog owner really expert in the same category of the products they mentioned.

The impact of the Attractiveness

According to table 1, when the Blog is high attractive, the means of brand attitude, product attitude, and purchase intension are significantly higher than those when the Blog is low attractive. So H3-2, H3-3 and H3-4 are supported. When it is high attractive, the means of brand memory is not significantly higher than that when it is low attractive. So H3-1 is not valid. This study shows that the layout attractiveness will impact the viewers’attitude toward brand or product and purchase intension . Consequently, the attractive Blog layout will have a better results than the unattractive layout.

DISCUSSION

Conclusion

There are many contributions in this study. First, prior research mostly focus on product placement employed by movies or TV programs (Vollmers, 1995; Gupta and Lord, 1998; d’Astous and Sequin, 1999; Russell, 2002), but this study is the first to explore the use of product placement on the medium of Blog. Second, this study identifies types of Blog product placement—background picture vs. text. This study finds that when the product placement was conducted in text form, the effect of placement was more significant than the formation of background. Third, this study examines how the source credibility affects the attitudes of Blog product placement. The level of confidence in the blogger’s expertise has no significant impact on the placement effect. A more attractive layout of the weblog was positive to brand attitude, product attitude, and purchase intention but had no significant impact on the brand memory.

Managerial Implications

Blogs are used in a variety of ways in the business world (Quible 2005), such as communication and collaboration (Herman 2003, Rosencrance 2004), reaching out to consumers’community (Herman 2003), advertising / promotion / marketing / customer service (Dearstyne 2005), knowledge management (Dearstyne 2005), improving the flow of information among employees (O’Shea2003) and training / educations (Dearstyne 2005).

This study investigates the effects of Blog product placement type and source credibility on the attitudes toward product placement. It may provide several implications for business world.

According to our results, the effects of text placement is significant than the effects of background placement. This is probably due to the strongest motive of readers to enter Blog is to read the contents of the the Blog and the experiences shared by the blogger. Consequently, this study would indicate a direction for marketing planning decision at corporations. It may be a sort of way to hire ghostwriting bloggers if at justifiable cost. In addition, Blogs which are too commercialized would not be loved by readers as Blogs which shares experiences sincerely. When Blog are identified to be close to business promotion, the effects would be weak and the Blog’s reputation would be affected. The effects of background placement are not as significant. But it is well accepted that bloggers used brand product background to show personal style.

From the perspective of source credibility, it is more effective to employ Blog with high attractiveness. However, expertise does not exercise significant difference on the effects. It can be judged that the main motive for Blog readers to browse Blog is not to look for product or product information. Consequently, Blogs are not as commercialized as Internet shopping sites. Blogers’expertise will not lead to readings’browsing. The lesson to the business world is when employing product placement, bloggers may not need to be equipped with the product-related expertise, but it is important to make the layout easy to read and attractive.

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