Nostalgia Brands and Consumer Behavior

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Nostalgia Brands and Consumer Behavior

We have heard the word nostalgia in many contexts. The meaning of this word has changed as the time has evolved. The word nostalgia has Greek origin. It is a combination of word nostos which means return and algos which means pain or distress. It was used in past times for the soldier who yearned for their homes in the times of war. Later the meaning of Nostalgia evolved, and people started relating it to remembering of the old times and feeling sad or happy. It is being related to a sense of longing now. People can get nostalgic remembering a moment from the past and relate their emotions with that. Nostalgia and consumer behavior are being studied from quite a few years now, and many studies have come up relating to this. Many experts have related Nostalgia with mood and emotions. When people think of nostalgia brands, they relate those brands to their memories and experiences which has an emotional connection with their minds. When a marketer plans for promoting nostalgia brands, they have to study the mechanism behind the behavior of the consumers related to a particular brand. Marketers not only need advertisement and segmentation, but they need to have proper penetration through the behavior of the consumers for a particular brand.

With the literature coming up with time, researchers have noticed that nostalgic brands have a positive impact on the consumers which result in the boosting of mood. People buy nostalgic brands to make them feel good or repairing their mood. It is a kind of actual enforcement or self-rewarding for them. Some researchers have found that when people are in negative moods, they tend to bring back their good memories in order to counter the negative feelings. So when the consumer finds something to better their mood, nostalgic brands come into the frame. These nostalgic brands have a more significant impact on the purchasing intentions of the consumers than the non-nostalgic brands.

One factor that is thought to affect the nostalgic brands is age. Nostalgic brands are considered to be a concept od millennials as many researchers feel that millennials have seen a wide range of change in the society from the 90’s to the technology savvy present. They think that this segment of people has a large share of memories which can make them feel nostalgic about brands. Just like when we take an example of the game Pokemon Go which became a big hit and was downloaded 800 million times till May 2018. There was a similar game in the past named Ingress which dint show such results. The difference between the success of Pokemon Go and Ingress was that millennials could find their past in the Pokemon Go as they had spent a right amount of their childhood watching that on television during the 90’s. The millennials mostly loved it as through this game they could lie their childhood dream again.

Nostalgia marketing has been used by many other companies as well to promote their brand and attract consumers. Cola-cola came up with Share-it-forward campaign in 2015 that had classic coke glass bottles. Same way when Instagram came into existence, they made their logo look like an old camera which reminded people of the older Polaroid. People were able to immediately connect themselves with the older time about which they still have some fond memories. It works well in marketing and advertising because people have made strong bonds with particular brands. Marketers have been talented at making people think that the past days were better than the present so that people will like the brands from the past even more. There are many other ways in which companies have used nostalgia to modify or impact consumer behavior. Restaurants have used it by playing old nostalgic music when they have a long line of customers standing and waiting to be seated. This mechanism has shown positive results for them. When people have a feeling of nostalgia, they try to spend more time in the present moment to make it a particularly fond memory.

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