The Walking Dead had a longtime product placement deal with Hyundai. Although it was much ridiculed, much of the point of product placement is to cause positive associations to be made between the product and the setting.

Many people may not have thought of a Hyundai as a rough-and-tumble kind of car, but seeing it in such a setting normalizes that association ever so subtly, not unlike why repetition is an effective strategy to commit something to memory.