The Impact of Language Barriers on Product Placement : A Qualitative Study Investigating Swedish Consumers’ Brand Recall and Brand Attitude Using Netflix Original Series

Abstract: Product placement has long been a popular advertising tool that is still heavily used in today’s market. Therefore, this thesis adds a new construct to the field of product placement, namely language barriers, to see if that can have an impact on consumers’ ability to perceive product placement, in terms of brand recall. Moreover, this study also explores alternative constructs, such as brand attitude, to examine if they have an influence on consumers’ ability to recall brands when viewing SVoD entertainment content containing product placement. Furthermore, the Tripartite Typology of Product Placement conducted by Russell (1998) was applied as the main theory throughout this thesis as a foundation of the product placement-concepts. Additionally, the aforementioned research topics were explored via 14 semi-structured interviews with Swedish consumers, where all participants were within the age group that are the largest consumers of SVoD content. After the data was collected and analyzed, the results yielded that language barriers have a negative impact on brand recall, in terms of verbal placement, and no impact in terms of visual placements. Moreover, some other factorsthat also impacted the participants’ ability to recall the placed products included brand attitude, personal interests and perception of brands.