As the marketing communication scenario has shifted, product placement has been loyal as an alternative to the traditional advertisement, without disruptively creating the branded content as an entertainment narrative. This empirical research is about the effectiveness of cinematic product placement in recognizing brand recall, attitude and purchase intentions among college students in Kannur district, Kerala. In data collection, a descriptive research design was employed where structured questionnaires containing 5-point Likert scales were used to collect data on 60 college students. The tool was found to have a satisfactory internal consistency as evidenced by Cronbach alpha of 0.702 with a total of 19 measurement items. The statistical analysis was done in the form of IBM SPSS and included the reliability, the descriptive statistics and frequency distribution analysis. The respondents indicate that 90 percent of them watch movies at least once a week, which implies that they are exposed to product placements in bulk. Results indicate that the brand awareness is high with 58.3% of the students strongly aware of branded products in movies. It is noteworthy that product placements were less annoying to 63.3 percent of workers than conventional TV or YouTube adverts, which means that a greater number of people are willing to receive this marketing approach. The study concluded that plot congruence (Mean = 3.72) was stronger as compared to visual prominence (Mean = 3.43) when it comes to placement effectiveness creation. Regarding the effects of memory, 55 percent of the respondents said they could remember brand names better when they were in shopping situations when they watched cinematic products and 48.3 percent of the respondents could recall brand name of the films they viewed recently. On the behavioural outcomes, 41.7% of the behavioural consequences told that they had changed their purchasing behaviours and 45% that they preferred a brand that was featured in movies and 46.7% that they would recommend a positively featured brand to others. However, the statistics indicate that there is a conversion funnel attenuation and the influence is lesser as the awareness (55%) and purchase influence (41.7%). Such outcomes are beneficial to different stakeholders in many ways. The marketing professionals should not only pay more attention to the narrative congruence rather than to visual dominance but also introduce the product placement to the context of more general communications. The content creators are required to sign discriminatory contracts that do not affect the originality and success of the commercial objectives. The policymakers should consider the open disclosure procedure and the greater control over the limited types of contents in the youth-oriented contents. Shortcomings of the research include small sample size, non-probability sampling, cross-sectional study and a geographical constraint of the research to the Kannur district. The future research will utilize large samples, which are demographically heterogeneous, experiments to establish causality besides longitudinal designs to establish real behaviours of purchases. It is a research that should be included in the limited number of studies that examine the efficacy of product placement in the local Indian context and provide evidence-based recommendations on the most effective strategies to use in product placement to reach young adult demographics (Paluck et al., 2015).(Eşiyok and Ozoran, 2022)awareness and recall (Rajesh, 2021).
EV et al. (Thu,) studied this question.