Does “product displacement” work better than product placement?
“Product displacement”, to explain, is when real-life brands are imitated in entertainment by a lookalike or soundalike. The fictional brand is close enough to the real one for consumers to recognise it. So, for example, the “Coffee Bucks” chain featured in hospital comedy Scrubs is a good example. We all can see that is pretty close to Starbucks.
Gladys Santiago, who runs the Product Displacement blog, argues that these fictional brands are even better for the real brands they imitate than planned product placement in many cases. Rather than putting off people who already face too much marketing messages, they are memorable through being tongue-in-cheek. They are memorable because consumers have to use a little bit of your imagination to recognise them and when they do, they feel media savvy and smart. She goes into more eloquent detail on her own blog here.
This made me think of a piece that one of my writers put together a couple of years ago, all about the brands from the world of TV, books and film that had been launched into the real world – we called it “reverse product placement” at the time.
It included numerous examples, from Bertie Bott’s Beans moving from Harry Potter to real-life grocery stores to the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. setting up business after the hit Forrest Gump. (If you have a subscription to Mad.co.uk, which archives content from our publisher’s magazines, you can read it here).
The idea was that all the positive elements generated by these fictional brands appearing in entertainment content gave them the perfect platform for being sold in real life. People already associated the no-longer-just-fictional brands with something fun and cool before they’d even hit the shelves.
“We learned from our market research that there was an unforced translation from the movie to a restaurant. It made sense in the consumers’ minds that such a thing would exist,” said the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. president, Scott Barnett, at the time.”That gives you an advantage because of the instant name recognition. On the other hand if you don’t deliver on the quality of the product, that brand does not have much chance.”
The Swingline stapler also came into demand in the real world after being used in a movie as a cult item for those people wishing to let others know about their personality in a tongue-in-cheek way.
The tale goes that during the production of the 1999 film Office Space , the production designer needed a stapler that was so special that the film’s character Milton would not allow his dreadful boss to steal it from him and keep it. The iconic fire-engine red Swingline stapler was not manufactured at the time but brand owner Acco developed a sample for the film.
After many requests from movie fans, Swingline decided to create and sell a red stapler based on the one in the film. “When someone sees a red Swingline on your desk, and they are ‘in the know’, it really says something about you,” said a source from Acco. “The only thing bad about having one is keeping people from stealing it.”
Reverse product placement could also be used to test consumer demand for new products. Nike’s Fukiyama sneakers appeared on the HBO television show Entourage. The TV show portrayed the shoes as so desirable that people were queuing up for them. As a result of this storyline there was huge demand in the real world for these shoes. Nike didn’t carry over this into the real world but it could have been a potentially lucrative new business opportunity for the shoemaker.
It’s an interesting area and it’s good to see people like Gladys Santiago giving it some serious thought and taking some interesting perspectives on how product placement can be more effective and used in a longer term way than simply during the film and its promotion. Any thoughts?
