Überweiss: Moving fictional brands into the real world
Brands are everywhere. Even in the fictional worlds we escape to for fantasy, comfort and entertainment. Real brands placed in fiction for marketing purposes is generally called product placement or brand placement. Recently, scholars have been wading into a related field called reverse product placement. That is essentially taking brands created in fiction and making them real for commercial purposes. A handful of well-known examples exist such as the Duff drinks from The Simpsons and Bubba Gump Shrimp from Forrest Gump. Attention was only drawn to this matter around a decade ago, so much still remains unknown in the field of fictional branding. Alexander Reading and Rebecca Jenkins studied the experiences people had of products born through reverse product placement and found that people generally make three types of connections to them. Connections to the self and others, connections to another world and emotional connections. The purpose of this study was to see if these connections could be validated and to see whether a clear target group exists for this kind of brands. The measurement was mostly designed by the author, but with the work of Reading and Jenkins, and Muzellec, Lynn and others taken into consideration. The two fictional brands used were Überweiss and Big Kahuna Burger and a total of 500 valid responses were gathered. The results imply that based on the demographic variables of gender, age, education and income there is no clear target group for fictional brands, although they seem a little more suited for younger audiences. Although the connections of Reading and Jenkins could not be thoroughly validated, they were shown to correlate to purchase intention of the brands.
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