Nostalgia Marketing: Appealing to Emotions

What is nostalgia marketing?

Nostalgia marketing doesn’t have to rely on specific products or brands, even though it can certainly help. Rather, as long as it catches the feeling of nostalgia, any symbol will do. For instance, the use of a grainier camera to replicate the feeling of old cameras is a great method of inducing nostalgia for Millennials. As long as you’re appealing to a pre-existing emotional bond that someone has, you’re doing nostalgia marketing.

Nostalgia marketing How-To

Maybe now you’re wondering how to do nostalgia marketing for yourself. Well, there are many steps you can take to make your business feel more retro!

• • Aesthetic appeal. If you want to appeal to people who are nostalgic for a certain time period, it would be a great idea to take a look at popular designs from that era. How were things packaged, what theme did the colours and fonts from that era have? For example, if your business is marketing a cereal and want to make it nostalgic, it would be a great idea to take a look at what the cereal boxes of the past looked like for inspiration.
  • Product revitalization. If aesthetic appeal is simply to mimic the popular imagery from a specific time period, then product revitalization is to quite literally bring the product back. Think of cancelled foods coming back, or old TV shows getting a reboot.

While your business can take these steps, it’s important to remember that with nostalgia marketing, you need to appeal to the past while also remaining in the present. Society is never standstill, and it may have changed a lot from the era that you’re using as inspiration for your nostalgia campaign. This means that you can use symbols from the past, but you should also reimagine the product today to make it better fit society today. One possible thing you can look at is politics; could the brand/product from the past that you want to use possibly be seen as offensive now? Could you improve on the language the original used in order to make it more appropriate for today’s audiences? To truly make an effective nostalgia marketing campaign, the important thing is to take the symbol of the past and freshen it up for today’s audiences; find a balance between the old and the new!

Benefits of nostalgia marketing

There are many benefits that come with using nostalgia to market something. Why don’t we take a look at a few of them together?

• • People are more willing to spend on things that make them feel nostalgic. A recent study found that nostalgia ‘reduces people’s desire for money’, which means that they feel more ready to part with money when they feel as though they have an emotional connection to something.
  • Nostalgia in marketing can simultaneously revitalise a brand while introducing new audiences to it. When you use nostalgia in your marketing, you’ll be appealing to audiences to have an emotional connection to the symbol that you’re using. If your business can do it effectively, then this will make people want to buy from you. Furthermore, by bringing that particular symbol to the present, you’re introducing a whole new generation of people to that symbol; bringing in new customers can be just as important as maintaining current ones.
  • Nostalgia comes with trustworthiness. People have rose-tinted lenses about the things from their childhood, and these lenses make the brands from the past seem a lot more trustworthy than the brands of today. With nostalgia, you can get audiences to trust your brand more, as they’ll associate your brand with the brands of their childhood.

Final Thoughts