How in-film product placement stimulates fast food consumption in developing countries

Fast food chains in the USA heavily use in-film product placement to globally stimulate favorable attitudinal/behavioral responses in viewers, who in turn receive the embedded promotional content with a low critical-thinking disposition and thus offer low resistance to persuasion. The persuasiveness of fast food product placement has been repeatedly established, but how the host film's characteristics contribute to such persuasiveness remains largely understudied. The film's characteristics may lead viewers to experience narrative transportation, identification with characters, perceived realism, enjoyment, familiarity with events, and approval of views, all of which may increase viewers' susceptibility to persuasion. To examine how these experiences contributed to explaining product placement persuasiveness, we conducted an experiment involving the screening of The Good Lie in a popular cinema in Chile. Participants (N= 812) were randomly assigned to an intervention group, which watched the original movie with a McDonald's placement, or to a control group, which watched a placement-free version of the same movie. Immediately after the film viewing, participants reported their experiences in a survey and chose between a McDonald's and Subway combo meal. A logistic regression model was built using a stepwise selection procedure in order to identify the combination of variables with the highest predictive power. The increase in McDonald's choice was best explained by the interaction among brand placement exposure, character identification, and narrative transportation. These findings may help guide educational interventions for developing country consumers to improve their cognitive abilities so they can better understand and resist fast food product placement persuasiveness.