OPINION19 May 2022
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OPINION19 May 2022
Nostalgia can be a powerful emotion if used correctly. India Doyle considers how marketers can use nostalgia to support their brand.
It will have escaped almost no-one that we’re in a nostalgia rut. From Y2K beauty to ultra-mini miniskirts, Smash Hit revivals, vinyl, Baby Gs… if you can remember it, there’s almost certainly a TikTok dedicated to it (at the very least). And more likely, there’s a brand revival of it. Indeed, with nostalgia-based campaigns from Gap, Polaroid, Ganni x Juicy to Barbie, Balmain, Creme Egg and more, it’s easy to feel a sense of temporal inertia. What’s going on?
As we start to examine our relationship with recent history, it becomes clear that the solutions we’ve come up with to tackle the challenges of the world we live in haven’t landed well, making the past all the more compelling. Reserach from the Institute of Economic Affairs found that 67% of Gen Zers say they want to live in a world with an explicitly socialist economic system, and feel that capitalism is to blame for the climate crisis. The sheen of the internet revolution is wearing off – even the Sims has created a ‘scared’ mode to reflect the anxiousness people feel online and in real life.
In the new age of space industrialisation, futurism is falling out of favour – 24% of Americans believe it’s unethical to go to space, and 48% of teens say that they’re either not interested or at least unsure about the metaverse. As the innovation-focused promises of this new millenium wear thin, the vast cultural archives we’ve amassed as part of growing digitisation also makes it easier to comb through recent history and old ideas and look at them in new ways.
Without leadership to guide people to look forwards about how to tackle the problems we face, people just keep getting stuck in retro vibe shifts and reboot cycles. At its most extreme, this becomes a form of toxic nostalgia where our relationship with the present is soured irreconcilably by a longing to return to a former state of being or way of doing things. Brexit and Donald Trump are both cultural examples of where nostalgia becomes ideologically weaponised. We know that nostalgia can be a really helpful and positive thing. Research has shown that not only can nostalgia relieve pain, but it can also make us more optimistic about the future. We also know that humans already use nostalgia to anticipate and solve upcoming challenges they may face. We’re calling this process of hacking the past to build for the future ‘Futurestalgia’.
Futuresalgia shows that people’s obsession looking backwards is actually being fuelled by a desire for guidance on how to navigate the future. It reflects people’s more active and inquisitive relationship with the past. And it’s not an abstract topic. Brands – having always played a key role in how people shape and build their identities – are in an exciting position to empower people to move beyond old favourites and start sprinting in new directions.
Three ways to elevate your brand’s nostalgia marketing strategy:
India Doyle is deputy editor at Canvas8.
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