Nostalgia is creeping its way past family gatherings and high school reunions. It seems that it’s always there: whooshing past us on subway ads, popping up in our inboxes, or in between videos. Nostalgia has become ever-present through targeted marketing campaigns, all carefully crafted to evoke feelings of the past. Tugging on the nostalgic heartstrings and using dated references can be a useful tool in eliciting brand loyalty.
Using social media as a thermometer, marketers can quickly determine the exact moment when something switches from dated to retro. Simultaneously, they must be careful because of pushing a product that consumers don’t want to see. Fortunately, social media acts as a direct, real-time window into consumers’ minds that can be used to find out which products they’re most nostalgic for.
Nostalgia offers marketers an opportunity to deeply connect with consumers’ emotions to bring out happy memories. If your brand’s messaging attempts to bring out happy memories from the past, it can help your audience feel better about the present, the future, and your product. Suppose you can build a connection with your customer, leaving them with a positive relationship with your brand. In that case, they’re that much more likely to make a purchase and trust your brand was moving forward.
Nostalgia works on a couple of different levels – individual, familial, community, nationally, culturally, generationally. We trigger nostalgic moments as a self-soothing mechanism – our regular dose of feel-good to get through the week. Nostalgia lights up the brain’s reward center, which may be why we like talking about the good old’ days.
Every single one of us has moments, periods, and times in our lives that we can look back on and say, “Ahh! The good old’ days.” Times when having a flip phone was still a luxury, and overalls were all the rage (those days seem to have returned for the overalls). Times of amazing childhood days spent watching Beyblade and Pokemon, running in your flashy sneakers, and feeding your virtual pocket pet.
Nostalgia Marketing works because it instantly disappears the days, months, years to make you feel like no time has passed at all since your significant moment. Secondly, it helps brands create an instant connection with their audiences by tapping into shared memory. Creating an opportunity to tie your brand’s message to a fond childhood memory can help make your brand and message more memorable.
Moreover, Nostalgia Marketing is used to differentiate its uniqueness and stimulate positive consumer responses to enhance business innovation growth. The result is coherent with Cui (2015), who studied the implementation of nostalgia marketing, and Rundh (2016) of the packaging’s role within marketing and value creation. Further studies focusing on consumers’ expectations of how they choose their products straightforwardly in the Malaysian context will also consider determining consumers’ characteristics such as goals, roles, behavior, product physical attributes, needs, preferences, opinions, innovation, and environmental factors that can influence purchase intention.
Sometimes brands use historical references to inspire nostalgia, thus generating a positive emotional approach between the product or service and its potential consumers (Cui, 2015). Some authors showed that nostalgia increases consumption while others found that when companies increase historical nostalgia in their commercial messages, consumers’ emotional relationships significantly increase because of their positive disposition towards the brand (Lasaleta, Sedikides, & Vohs, 2014; Marchegiani & Phau, 2010).
For marketers looking to harness nostalgia feelings, the most effective way to do so could be through music. It can also help connect with so-called ‘fauxstalgists’ – those who have warm feelings for a decade, even if they are too young to remember it.
The 1960s conjures the strongest associations with music (38% of all mentions), particularly The Beatles. Culture and fashion associations are also vital in all decades, except the 2000s when technology is at the forefront of people’s memories.
Nostalgia Marketing
