Summary: | Since product placement is a relatively new phenomenon in Swedish television, there is a lack of research on what attitudes Swedish TV-viewers hold towards it. This is where our paper will contribute to the research. The purpose of this reserachpaper is to describe and analyze what attitude Swedish TV-viewers has towards product placement. Kim Schröders multidimensional model of mass media reception were used, which is a developed model from Stuart Hall’s “encoding/decoding” one-dimensional model. As a complement to Schröders model The Elaboration Likelihood Model by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo was applied to the gathered material. ELM is a dual process theory which describes how attitudes form and change. The method used, focus groups, is a suitable method when describing and analyzing attitudes. The material generated from the focus groups interviews were divided into two themes “motivation” and “position” deriving from Schröders model. The results of the research came to show that the respondents in this study, who had grown up with commercial television, held positive attitudes towards product placement. While the respondents, who had not grown up with commercial television, was critical, questioning and suspicious towards it. The younger respondents formed negative attitudes towards the phenomenon when they felt that the product placement were an unnatural interruption in the television show while the older respondents showed no such tendencies. Both age groups showed that characters in movies and television shows could temporary affect their attitude on product placement either positive or negative. This research paper makes an attempt to contribute to the rather unexplored area of attitude research on product placement amongst Swedish TV-viewers.
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