“And Now a Word from Our Sponsors “ - How product placement and brand repetition in sport video games affects the consumers’ brand recall & recognition, brand familiarity, brand attitude and purchase intention

With the continuous growth of the video game industry and the increasing popularity of Esports tournaments, gaming events and games themselves, product placement in video games have evolved into an exciting and profitable way to reach consumers. Especially in the sport video gaming genre, in-game advertisements offer new opportunities for the gaming industry and the advertisers. Earlier studies have focused on brand memory, brand location, and advertisement type, while repetition effects of advertisements is still an underdeveloped area of product placement research. Therefore, this study focuses on the effects of brand repetition and product placement in sport video games on brand recall, brand recognition, and brand familiarity of the sport video gamer. Even though previous research has studied the brand attitude and the purchase intention of the gamer, repetition effects have not been investigated. This research will also look at the effects of brand repetition and product placement in sport video games on consumer behavior to contribute to the existing literature on this subject. A 3 (repetition: high vs. low vs. none) design is used to test the effects of brand repetition and product placement on the sport video gamer. The respondents were asked to answer questions of one of the three online questionnaires with the different levels of repetition. The survey asked questions on brand recall and recognition, brand familiarity, brand attitude and purchase intention of the sport video gamer. The procedure entailed a pretest and the main experiment. Data analysis was conducted through SPSS and the use of paired-samples T-tests, Analysis of Covariance tests and linear regressions. The findings revealed no significant differences for brand repetition effects on the subjects, except for the brand recall of the more familiar target brand Adidas. The interaction between brand familiarity and brand repetition also showed no significant effect on the brand recall and the brand recognition. Although the study did not find many significant results, the research contributes to the existing literature on brand recall of more familiar brands and the consumer behavior of the sport video gamer. Moreover, the findings also contribute to the repetition effects in video games, which is still an underdeveloped area of research. The results will provide both academic and practical relevance for this study. Managerial implications, reliability, and validity, generalizability, limitations, and suggestions for further research are also addressed.