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ORCID

Magdalena Hofman-Kohlmeyer: 0000-0001-9201-3308

Keywords

product placement, placement method, placement strategy, in-game advertising, brand

Abstract

Nowadays, new technologies enable practitioners to create brand experience in the virtual world of computer games. Marketers use product placement to reach potential and current customers. In the meantime, computer games have become an attractive medium because they attract an increasingly wider audience of different genders and various age groups. Therefore, an important issue is to know and systematize current methods of brand placement in computer games. For the purpose, the author carried out 20 in-depth interviews with players of chosen computer games, Second Life, Euro Truck Simulator 2 and The Sims. According to the analysis, it can be distinguished by the following typology: place of brand placement (before logging, inside the game, in separate windows, and on external websites), brand availability (paid brand appearance and free brand appearance), the source of brand placement (game producer, organizations, and players), virtual forms of promotion (advertising, public relations, direct marketing, personal selling, sales promotion, and word-of-mouth marketing), the degree of use of the branded product in game (full use and limited use of the branded product). The presented paper contributes to the theory of marketing communication and branding.

Acknowledgments

The presented study is a part of the research project titled “Brand introduction into virtual worlds of computer games as a form of customer engagement,” which was granted funding from Poland’s National Science Centre (Preludium 17, 2019/33/N/HS4/01530).

Funding

The cost of editing selected articles published in the Journal of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour in Emerging Markets in the 2022–2024 is covered by funding under the program “Development of Scientific Journals” of the Ministry of Educationand Science under agreement No. RCN/SN/0322/2021/1. Task title: “Verification and correction of scientific articles and their abstracts”. Funding value: 25 053,00 PLN; The task consists of professional editing of articles published in English

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and publication of the article.

Declaration about the scope of AI utilization

The authors did not use an AI tool in the preparation of the article.

First Page

14

Last Page

34

Page Count

21

Received Date

24.09.2023

Revised Date

03.11.2023

Accepted Date

11.11.2023

Online Available Date

09.02.2024

DOI

10.7172/2449-6634.jmcbem.2024.1.2

JEL Code

M31

Publisher

University of Warsaw

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