Evaluative Conditioning

What it is

The usual starting point is a 1975 paper by A. B. Levey and Irene Martin on the conditioning of evaluative responses. The idea is that liking can be learned by association, without the person being told anything about the thing.

In advertising, the pairing is between a brand and whatever is on screen with it: a face, a song, a moment in a story or a moment in a game.

In effect

In 2023 Moritz Ingendahl and colleagues tested the idea in two experiments in a 3D first-person game. Only brands encountered during positive in-game experiences benefited from the placement, and brands met during negative experiences did not.

Attitudes depended largely on players' memory of which brands went with which experiences. The effect was larger when players paid attention to the pairings, for example when they were central to the game's storyline.

What it does not say

It does not say any placement helps. In these experiments a placement met during a bad stretch of play did not.

It does not say the effect is large. The same paper opens by noting that the overall effect of brand placements in games on attitudes is small and inconsistent across studies.

The account of the experiments here rests on the published abstract.

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