Blame it on Hollywood: The Influence of Films on Paris as Product Location

This paper explores the way location myths conveyed through Hollywood movies influence consumer expectations, by looking at how the city of Paris is represented in motion pictures. We develop measures of the location image of Paris in a sample of Hollywood movies released between 1985 and 2011. These are used to examine the images of Paris held by American consumers who have never directly experienced the location. Our results show that Hollywood movies project specific location images and myths of Paris. More specifically, we show that these images fall into two distinct stereotypic patterns and are widely shared by consumers. Individuals who seek information on location from popular culture are shown to embrace and reproduce Paris myths. The study concludes that the cultural industries influence the cognitive consumption of location through the production and dissemination of meaning, via stories and fuelled by perpetual myth making