The good, the bad, and the bygone: Why nostalgia marketing isn’t everything
Sam Somers writes about how to be wary of nostalgia marketing given the shift in values post-pandemic, as well as the recent 80’s trends resurfacing amongst other reprises from pop-culture.
Nostalgia has been used as a powerful marketing tactic for decades, but that doesn’t mean it’s always a good one. Whether it’s Seinfeld’s famous lawyer, Jacki Childs, reprising his role to sell pretzels or Netflix’s very 1980s inspired billboard ads promoting fake brands from the Stranger Things universe, it’s become comfort food for consumers who want a quick fix – and some easy PR for companies. But as the world has shifted dramatically in the past three years, people have grown tired of the inauthentic and see-through values that brands frequently employ in marketing. Instead, what is in demand are values that focus on openness, honesty and authenticity.
From B Corporations to ESG policies, this time of dramatic change demands honesty. And nostalgia marketing isn’t always honest, in fact, it’s rife with falsehoods. It can romanticise past things in order to foster consumerism in the younger generations, meaning that as a comms professional or as a marketer, you need to be cautious when leaning on nostalgia marketing just because times are hard or it’s an easy win.
People revert to nostalgia in hard times because it’s easy to look back on how good things used to be. If we look at Millennials – who now make up 21.5% of the Australian population according to the 2021 Census – they are a generation who have lived through multiple once-in-a-lifetime economic crashes and disasters. They have lived through what is now commonly referred to on the internet as our societal peak: the late 1990s economic boom. There’s no doubt here that nostalgia comes on strong when you’ve had access to the internet from a young age. It’s a given.
