Understanding the Power of Nostalgia in Marketing Campaigns

“Marketers have been using nostalgia as a tool to communicate with their audience for decades.”

by Ben Walker

Remember when things were cheaper? We used to ride bikes to each other’s houses and knock on the door, we had silly hairstyles and enjoyed the summer sun. Those were the good old days; things were so much simpler then.

Are you feeling a little bit warmer inside? Nostalgia is powerful, whether you have deep rooted memories of those simpler times or if you’re just remembering Stand By Me or Stranger Things, it evokes a response.

Marketers have been using nostalgia as a tool to communicate with their audience for decades. Nostalgia is about branding and it’s about engagement, and it’s an excellent way to form a genuine connection with your audience.

Nostalgia can be general. Family-focused brands and products might dig deep into the recent past and create feelings of simplicity to engage their audience. Nostalgia can be specific, clothing brands might evoke a time when Pop Punk ruled the radio to say hey, we know what you like. Nostalgia can even evoke a response from generations looking back to a time from before they were born.

So, how do you unlock that warm, happy response?

Step One: Know your audience. Know your brand. Be genuine.

As always, knowing your brand and your audience is essential. Your brand identity and your audience are so intertwined that it forms a relationship. You need to understand this relationship, this is the key to communicating effective marketing.

The most important question to ask is whether or not your communications represent your brand and honour that relationship. Fundamentally, if you’re marketing for the sake of marketing, or trying to evoke nostalgia without the psychology that underpins it, then you’re not reaching your audience.

Maybe using nostalgia in your marketing isn’t right for your brand. It’s much more important to be genuine than it is to send any old message out. We’ve all seen those adverts on TV showing happy families laughing and growing up together where a brand is “there for life”, before an incongruous logo fades in from the darkness causing an eyebrow to raise. A travel company will not be with you for life, nor do you want them watching you grow up through your window, they’re there for when you want a holiday.

These ads come across as disingenuous and create the opposite feeling to the one they’re trying to evoke. They create a feeling of distance. They show that the brand hasn’t recognised its audience’s wants and doesn’t know how to communicate with them. Nostalgia isn’t always relevant, there’s a reason why memes die when brands start tweeting them, so before you wield its power, ask yourself if you’re following a trend or reinforcing real customer connection to your brand.

You should never do anything just because others are. If that brand jumped off a cliff, would you follow them? Your engagement might if you chase trends.

And this is what makes nostalgia such a powerful tool. It doesn’t create indifference, when it works, it works. Get a genuine message at that succinctly represents your brand and hits the warm fuzzy release mechanisms in your audience’s brains and you’ll have created something really memorable.

Step Two: Understand the power of nostalgia.

The human brain is hard-wired to make connections. It’s how we learn and it’s how we experience. Nostalgia is a complex emotion that hits so many emotional triggers that it isn’t simply looking back in time and smiling. Loneliness can trigger nostalgia¹, as can familiar smells, sounds, keepsakes and conversations. Nostalgia comes from the Greek words for “return home” (nostos) and “pain” (algos), and it’s the bittersweet, proud painfulness of looking back with a smile and a tear in your eye.

Critically, nostalgia is often rose-tinted, meaning that it’s a hyper-focus on a particular event, object or feeling and not on the wider context. Dial up was terrible, loud and frustrating and yet the sound of a telephone line arguing with the world wide web makes me feel cosy inside. Therefore, it’s not just about time or memory, it’s about feeling a connection to a time or memory.

So, how do you draw out that emotion?

Memory is far too complex to run through right now and I’ve forgotten most of the important things anyway, but memories come charged with emotions and teachings. As a marketer, you’ll be able to evoke these emotions by using parallel iconography or stimuli and by focusing on zeitgeist more than specificity. Your artwork doesn’t have to be hyper-specific, in fact, it’s better if it isn’t. An image of dandelion seeds getting taken away by a summer breeze can have a setting of any decade, but it can still remind your audience of home. An image of a messy 90s bedroom may not have the desired effect.

And guess what, as nostalgia is part of the human experience, your audience can feel it without ever having lived when your campaign is set. Pseudo-nostalgia² isn’t a new thing, but awareness of it was supercharged with Gen-z missing the good old days of the 80s having never lived in them thanks to a little show called Stranger Things.

Accuracy is important, but, if an anachronism or two slips in, so long as you’ve captured the sense of your setting and placed in some memory triggers, such as bicycles, cassette tapes, radios, dial up or disco balls (though not necessarily on the same artwork), you’re on the right track to evoking the right emotions.

Step Three: Plan your marketing campaign

Failing to plan is planning to fail. To maximise the success of your marketing campaign, it is essential to plan every part of it and ensure everything comes together.

Create your artwork.

Here’s the fun part. Your artwork can evoke the marketing of the time you’re replicating, and it can use iconography to take your audience back, and it can tie your audience to your brand, their present, and their happy memories.

Relevance here is critical. It is important to be authentic, genuine, and have something to say. There’s plenty to talk about, people are busy, stressed, online almost all the time, they’re missing their free time, struggling with work-life balance and your brand might be offering them an escape from that cycle, so show them.

Instead of just kids laughing and riding bikes, the message is “remember the freedom back then? No homework for the summer holidays? Your parents paid for things? Want to feel that again?” If that message doesn’t pair with your brand or your offering, like if you’re an insurance broker or healthcare brand, artwork of summer holidays and kids on bikes could be seen as a reductive imitation and not a genuine attempt at a connection.

So, it is essential that your brand, your offering and your messaging all interact with the style, the subject of the artwork, the colours, and the iconography littered about to ensure it’s relevant. When all of these elements interplay well, you have something powerful on your hands.

Choose your timing.

The key to comedy is… It’s also the timing key to the best marketing campaigns. If you’re distributing a winter campaign, people want to feel warm, cozy, and want to romanticise spending time with family.

Visuals of summer during winter may work if you’re trying to bring out the urge for warmth, but fireplaces, families, and festivity will likely work better. You can use seasonality to supercharge nostalgia, or you can simply time campaigns so that they aren’t hindered by the climate.

But remember, retro and summer can go together like bread and butter. Longer days and summer holidays. If you want your campaign to go retro, a summertime campaign may well hit all the right notes.

Choose your channels.

Here’s where you reach your audience. Distributing your marketing campaign through multiple channels can extend your reach, but it doesn’t necessarily reach the correct demographics or audience.

Data can help here, out of home marketing and door drops help you reach relevant postal sectors, where direct mailers can help you pinpoint the best demographics to market to, whether that’s from your own CRM or from marketing technologies.

Certain demographics will gravitate towards certain channels, too, so knowing where your audience is will be essential. Also, capturing what kind of mood your audience will be and knowing the context they’re sitting in when your message reaches them will help. If you’re marketing on LinkedIn, for example, your audience might be looking for some work-based escapism as they scour for prospects or knowledge.

Step Four: Listen to the results.

Always measure the success of your campaigns. This isn’t just click-through rates and impressions. Talk to your customers and find out what resonates with them. Get to know them.

Just because nostalgia-based marketing doesn’t work the first time, doesn’t mean it won’t work the second, nor does it mean that it will. It’s important to drill down into the results and analyse if it was the timing, the message, the channels, or other factors.

If you can get a nostalgia-based campaign working, however, and get a great response from your audience, look at the same metrics, analyse what made it successful, artwork, message, timing, and replicate it. Always iterate and always analyse what drives success and failure, because failure just leaves a gap for future success.

Knowing the landscape is important, it might be something happening now that made your campaign successful, and really getting to know your audience helps illuminate the statistics and data and brings them to life. Remember your audience aren’t just data and they’re not just a click, they’re a real human being to engage and communicate with.

¹ https://www.southampton.ac.uk/nostalgia/what-nostalgia-is.page

² https://www.jstor.org/stable/30040534