植入品牌记忆激活路径及激活水平影响因素研究

A Pattern of Activation and Factors Influencing Memory Retrieval of Product Placement

根据激活扩散理论,命题网络中节点之间的联接构成激活路径,找出与植入式广告紧密相关的节点信息,可为二次传播和植入设计优化提供理论依据。通过口语报告法和品牌概念图对植入式广告受众记忆的激活路径进行研究,运用有序分类回归方法对激活路径的影响因素进行分析,研究结果发现主角及其行为是联接电影情节和品牌记忆的关键节点,可以作为主要的记忆提取线索;在无角色参与情境中,内源性记忆较强的植入品牌特征也可以成功激活受众记忆;情节关联度、显著度、品牌熟悉度对记忆激活水平有显著影响。

Advertising practitioners generally regard brand recall as an important indicator of product placement effectiveness. But excessive pursuit of brand memory by competing with media content for audiences’ attention is very harmful,which not only tears up the mask of unobtrusiveness of product placement,but also interferes with the perception fluency of audiences’ entertainment experience,and impairs the aesthetic value of film or TV play itself. The key to gain the benefits of product placement is whether consumers can recall the association between brand and media content beyond entertainment media,especially in the process of purchase decision-making. The researchers paid little attention to memory retrieval for product placement and its association with media content. Currently,stimulus-response model is mostly used in the study of memory for product placement,and the relationship between stimulus and memory is tested experimentally. But the information processing inside audiences’ mind is still considered as a'black box'. According to spreading activation theory from the cognitive psychology principle,memory was stored in a network form,the objects in the media content sustained in the network are sources of activation,and activation can spread from these objects to associated elements. This infers that memory performance can be improved by offering cues closely associated with specific memory.Based on the nature of product placement,propositional network theory and spreading activation theory were employed to analyze how audiences form memory network for product placement and what factors influence memory retrieval. We conducted three steps to process the research. Firstly,31 participants were recruited and trained according to the procedure of verbal report method after research materials preparation. Secondly,all the participants were exposed to the video clip we selected. Then following the verbal report instruction,viewers were asked to report the brands they had seen in the video and how they memorized them by unaided recall and recognition. 130 thousand words of verbal report were finally obtained. Thirdly,we analyzed the texts participants reported and drew pattern of activation by conducting the brand concept maps,and checked out the influential factors by ordinal logistic regression.Three conclusions have been drawn in this study: (1) The pattern of activation of memory for product placement was mainly set up around actors and plot. According to their content,nodes of pattern of activation could be classified into two categories,plot information nodes (i. e. actor node,actor’s location node,action node and story association node) and placement information nodes (i. e. brand or product name node,brand logo node,brand or product feature node,brand association node,brand or product’s location node,node of relationship between product and actor);They also could be classified as exogenous nodes and endogenous nodes according to the sources of memory during encoding process. (2) 'Leading actor-relationship-brand'is a main proposition in the pattern of activation. If a placement was accompanying with the actors,especially leading actors and their performing actions,nodes could be used as a main retrieval cue,which is the key to make a firm association between media content and placed brand. If a placement was not accompanying with the actors,the endogenous memory for the salient characteristics of placed bland could take the role of actors instead. (3) The higher level of prominence and brand familiarity,then the higher level of memory activation;used-by-main-character placements and story-connected placements (i. e. plot connection) led to higher level of memory activation than background placements did. The design of product placement should follow the principle of double clues. That was either or both of the leading actors or their performing actions and the memorable characteristics of brands placed should be firmly associated with the product placement.