Concept: Nostalgia - Advertising

The power of nostalgia in advertising

Marketing experts tell us again and again that the key to sales is to make a connection to the customer. Clearly it’s easier and faster to co-opt our fond memories than create a brand new positive association with your product. Two giants of advertising, Pepsi and Coke, appear to be masters at tapping into our fake nostalgia with many of their commercials vividly displaying their generational history. At its heart, their message is “Remember way back when you were young? Well, we were there with you”.

As we age our nostalgic yearnings grow, making us more receptive to advertisers and marketers use of what researchers call "a longing for positive memories from the past." In addition to time's arrow, this desire for nostalgia is further intensified by society's present circumstance of receding predictability and opportunity. While science is still struggling to unravel the neuro-dynamics of nostalgia, studies have identified some nostalgic cues that can be exploited and how images and sounds from the past can create favorable attitudes about products. Despite being obvious, this strategy taps into something fundamental about the human mind and consciousness. Every time we remember a past event it not only evokes the earlier memory, but can re-cast the past into a more pleasing "remembered" version. Memory, thinking and feeling are an active, shaping process.

What makes us nostalgic?

The music, cars and movies you identified with when you were young stick with you throughout your life. Take music, recordings that were released when we were teenagers or young adults, are locked into our memories forever, to release a flood of vivid memories and emotions when replayed, especially in ads. For example, people who were 23 in 1964, when the Beatles appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show," will turn 70 this year, are a prime target for nostalgic marketing appeals.

(The feeling of nostalgia varies from age to age therefore advertisers need to think of new and innovative ways of appealing to a broad target market.)

For marketers, the key is finding the right music and images, which do not even need to directly relate to their products, as long as warm feelings are stirred up. It is the emotion generated from that good feeling that influences people's evaluation of the advertised offer. Recollection provides context and context impacts on how we evaluate things. Moreover, nostalgia can make us feel that not so much time has passed between then and now, making us feel young(er) again and that we still have a long ways to go and have the time to make it "there." Nostalgia telescopes time and brings it more under our emotional orchestration.