Product placement in marketing communications and a research on undergraduate students' attitudes toward product placement

ABSTRACTPRODUCT PLACEMENT IN MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS AND ARESEARCH ON UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS? ATTITUDES TOWARDPRODUCT PLACEMENTErdem AKKANDepartment of Business AdministrationAnadolu University Social Sciences Institute, September 2006Advisor: Asis. Prof. Dr. Gülfidan BarışNowadays marketers are using many communication tools in order to reach finalconsumers. Increase in the number of both these new tools and the brands in the marketcause the consumers to be exposed to heavy message bombardment. This situation makesdifficult for the marketers to differentiate their brands and cause a natural advertisementresistance or insensitivity in consumers toward advertisements.For all these reasons, marketers are consistently searching for alternative mediums thatcould bring together the messages with their consumers. The concept product placement isone of these new mediums. The concept product placement has been investigated indifferent aspects in foreign literature, however there are no adequate source in Turkishabout the concept.In this study, initially, the position of product placement concept in marketingcommunications is tired to be defined and then its legal status and application in Turkey isexplained. In addition, some information about its ethical aspects, which is frequentlydiscussed in literature, is presented.Various researches reveal that undergraduate students constitute quite a big part of movieaudience. Thereby, at the implementation part of the study, the attitudes of Turkish movieaudience were tried to be examined on a sample which is composed of undergraduatestudents.