The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of product involvement and brand prominence on advergamers’ brand recall and brand attitude in an emerging market context. Specifically, this research illustrates the conditions under which brand placements in online games create attention, elaboration and subsequent brand recall and brand attitude by drawing the insights from the limited capacity model of attention and the elaboration likelihood model.
A 2 (product involvement: low or high) × 2 (brand prominence: prominent or subtle) between-subject measures design is used. In total, 280 students participated in the study. A 2×2 between-subjects MANOVA is used to test the hypotheses.
In the context of advergames, for a low-involvement product, a prominent brand placement results in greater brand recall than a subtle brand placement. However, for a high-involvement product, a subtle-placement results in greater brand recall than a prominent brand placement. Further, results reveal that for a low-involvement product, a subtle brand placement results in more favorable brand attitude than a prominent brand placement. For a high-involvement product, a prominent brand placement results in more favorable brand attitude than a subtle brand placement.
The findings and conclusions are very important for advertising experts in terms of advergame designing, execution and for an operational use of brand placements in advergames.
This investigation adds to the online advertising literature, specifically the advergames context by examining and analyzing the real-time roles of advergame-specific factor, such as brand prominence and the gamer-specific factor, such as product involvement in creating gamers’ brand recall and brand attitude from attention and elaboration perspectives in an emerging market context like India.
