Building a Brand From Fiction: The Simpsons and Duff

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-596-6_53How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Reverse product placement; modes of representation; spectator-consumers

Abstract

Reverse product placement provides many benefits to products positioned with this marketing strategy. This is the case of the Duff beer brand, an originally fictitious product presented in The Simpsons. Through content analysis, this research unravels the modes of representation and functions of reverse product placement in an episode of the series. The results reveal how a brand is constructed from fiction: the integration of a product that does not yet exist, such as Duff beer, in the plot of The Simpsons series, gives the product a prominent visibility, in addition to offering it significant narrative relevance. Thus, the product becomes a central element in the fictional universe and influences the viewers’ perceptions and emotions. The presence of the fictional product Duff in the series provokes a cultural and emotional association that turns viewers into potential future consumers. In this article, it is shown that the audiovisual and plot attributes come from the use of narrative modes with two symmetrical functions: diegetic and emotional.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Gabriel Martín Wong-García
AU  - Paul Llaque
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/12/17
TI  - Building a Brand From Fiction: The Simpsons and Duff
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Communication and Applied Technologies 2024 (ICOMTA 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 608
EP  - 618
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-596-6_53
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-596-6_53
ID  - Wong-García2024
ER  -