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Memories, Marketing and Money (Jim Karrh On Marketing)

3 min read

As spring moves into summer it becomes time for reunions (both the class reunion and family reunion varieties). I write this while returning from an alumni meeting at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where several class reunions were also being set up across the larger Duke campus. Nostalgia was in the air (to an even greater degree than was pollen). So were requests for contributions to the annual fund.

There is new and timely research on consumers and nostalgia, offering not only confirmation that nostalgia is an effective marketing and fundraising tool but also insights into why.

Many notable marketing campaigns have been built on the foundation of nostalgia. Pepsi went the retro route in 2009 with Throwback, sweetened with real sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup and placed into old-school packaging. Two years later, Pepsi announced that both Pepsi Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback would be permanent additions to its product line. (In many areas, Pepsi Throwback is labeled “Pepsi-Cola Made With Real Sugar.”) The Facebook page even featured an Atari arcade game.

The nostalgia strategy isn’t confined to low-priced items or even to boomer or Gen X consumers. Subaru’s “First Car Story” campaign in 2012 had users recreating their first-car stories through real-time animation and then sharing via social media. The so-called millennials came through in a big way for actor LeVar Burton; he raised more than a million dollars on Kickstarter to bring back the kids’ show “Reading Rainbow.” Of course, Throwback Thursdays (#tbt) are a powerful phenomenon on social media.

Nostalgia is a convenient — perhaps even easy — message hook. Does it tend to work just due to temporary warm fuzzies, or is something more profound going on in consumers’ minds? In a series of six experiments, researchers Jannine Lasaleta, Constantine Sedikides and Kathleen Vohs compared the preferences of people who were prompted to either think about the past or about new and future memories. The results showed a consistent pattern: The past-memories group was willing to pay more for products and give more to others and less willing to perform an unpleasant task in exchange for money. In sum, they were less attached to money when feeling nostalgic.

The studies found that a certain type of nostalgia hits the magic marketing button. Memories that relate to what the researchers call “social connectedness” are the most powerful. Their interpretation is that people either buy stuff to make themselves feel good or rely on the people around them to provide those good feelings. Social connectedness and money are, to a degree, interchangeable; when consumers have plenty of one they feel less need for the other. Lasaleta wrote, “If people implicitly think their wants and needs can be satisfied either by having enough money or having enough social support, then having ample amounts of one should decrease the desire for the other.”

That interpretation is itself open to interpretation, but the overall pattern seen in both controlled studies and hundreds of real-world marketing campaigns is clear. Perhaps that is why, as I saw all over again, reunions are such ripe opportunities for fundraising. Many of the best development messages combine nostalgia — usually with pictures from way back then — and social connections of today.

You need not be a fundraiser, or have the budget or reach of a PepsiCo, in order to leverage nostalgia for your organization. Many companies have, for example, used #tbt to share photos of their first store, early employees and customers or long-ago versions of their products.

Here’s hoping you can grow through some elements of nostalgia, making tomorrow even better than the good old days.

Jim Karrh of Little Rock is a marketing consultant, trainer and speaker. See JimKarrh.com, email him at Jim@JimKarrh.com and follow him on Twitter @JimKarrh.

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