Where the Most Trusted Cereal is a Star

Recently we looked at movie product placement.

But there is much more.

Streaming Product Placement

In the office and at home, “Succession,” showcases Dell’s products. Similarly, in Netflix’s “He’s All That” and Hulu’s “How I Met Your Father,” Core Hydration (water) is at the table, in someone’s hand, on the kitchen counter.

Branding companies might even tweak a story so that their product gets a cameo role. They use products to send a message about a character. After all, your car or your whiskey say something about you. So too does your cereal, especially if it’s Cheerios.

With Cheerios in the #1 slot as the most trusted food and beverage brand, M&Ms and Ritz are close behind:

I guess our trust is why Cheerios are almost everywhere. Below, we can see them in series that range from “Inventing Anna” and “Fuller House” to “Station Eleven” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm:”

Our Bottom Line: Brand Value

From here, we can take the leap to brand value.

A brand is a personality that distinguishes a good or a service from all others. It can relate to a taste, a texture, a technology. It can shape what a consumer experiences. When a brand is doing its job, it adds to the value of the good or service. And of course, brands help firms compete.

In our scale of competitive market structures, the big brand names are the oligopolies that have pricing power, limited market entry and exit, many buyers, and mass production. Also, like Coke wants to be different from Pepsi, they depend on product differentiation.

Along a competitive market structures continuum, Cheerios has all of the characteristics of a typical oligopoly:

Especially because most of us ignore ads, it makes sense for Cheerios to send its message to millions of viewers through product placement.

My sources and more: Reading the NY Times, I realized it was time to supplement our movie post on product placement. Then quite fortuitously, I discovered that Cheerios was the most trusted cereal. (I should add that I only trust Nature’s Path Organic Heritage Flakes.) Please note that several of today’s sentences about brands were in a past Econlife post.