Connecting Virtual World Perception to Real World Consumption

Product placement, the intentional, paid inclusion of product, service, brand or/and brand identifier into media content, has gained popularity since the 1980s and is considered an effective marketing practice to influence consumers'attitudes and behaviors. Recently, with the emergence of social network sites, more and more products and brands have been integrated into this newly emerged media platform. In particular, with the growing worldwide popularity of social gaming like Mafia Wars, which is played by more than 25 million social media users each month on Facebook, marketers started weaving brands into the social gaming environment. However, compared to the popularity of industry practice, very little academic literature exists on how to best utilize product placements in this new and budding media platform to achieve maximum marketing communication effects. This book, therefore, provides a new metric of success for social network marketing by revealing how Chinese urban white-collar professionals perceive, understand, and interpret product placements woven in a newly launched and very popular Chinese SNS: Happy Network (www.kaxin001.com).