John Steinbeck once described a perfect day. He wrote, “It was one of those days in Monterey when the air is washed and polished like a lens, so that you can see the houses in Santa Cruz twenty miles across the bay and you can see the redwood trees on a mountain above Watsonville.”
He goes on to say, “…people sit looking off into the distance and remember inaccurately that the days of their youth were all like that.” And that is exactly why nostalgia in advertising works. It transports us back to a time we’ve already romanticized.
Like comfort food for marketing
A study in the Journal of Consumer Research found nostalgic feelings make people more willing to spend on consumer goods and services. Nostalgia is comforting. In the era of COVID-19, get ready for more ads to go retro.
Nostalgia has always been a marketing tactic but it’s likely to be used more often now. Our present is a health and economic crisis. Our future is unpredictable at best, but our past is perfect. Even painful memories can invoke positive feelings. Nostalgia can help us through the bad times. A study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology concluded that nostalgia makes life more meaningful to us, and significantly, it reminds us it is possible to overcome hardships.
Here is a video from Nintendo which hits the nostalgia mark multiple ways.
Life’s soundtrack
Music is one of the easiest ways to trigger nostalgia in general, so it’s no surprise it can work magic in an ad. Why does it work? Scientific studies showed that listening to nostalgic music made people’s temperature tick up; it made them warmer.
A decade ago, Cadillac exploited nostalgia with a band that is compelling to many generations.
Obviously, few businesses can find the seven figures it takes to license a Led Zeppelin song for commercial use. It’s not easy or inexpensive to visually recreate the past either. But, there are ways to give your brand a nostalgic boost. Contact us. We can help you make yesterday work today.