Nostalgia marketing

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Ananya Bhargava: Social media users have started calling 2026 the new 2016, as feeds fill with throwback photos, mid-2010s aesthetics, and revisited pop culture moments from just a decade ago. At the same time, brands are tapping into that same emotional current, from Super Bowl ads built around familiar characters to campaigns that revive old music, visuals, and storylines. While nostalgia isn’t a new concept for any generation, it feels like brands and consumers are embracing it more than ever before.

I’m joined by Dr. Evan Weingarten, an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the USC Marshall School of Business. His research explores how people’s experiences and memories shape their feelings, decisions, and well-being. And in this episode, we’ll discuss why nostalgia resonates so strongly with consumers, how it shapes purchase decisions and brand perception, and what behavioral research reveals about its psychological appeal.

Evan Weingarten: My name is Evan Weingarten. I did my undergraduate at the University of Chicago, then I did my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. I’ve spent several years at University of California San Diego, Arizona State University, and now University of Southern California. I did a lot of research within judgment, decision making when I started graduate school, and even when I was an undergraduate research assistant at the University of Chicago’s School of Business. I mostly ran surveys, but knew a lot of these researchers that were doing judgment and decision making. Contrary to a lot of the old school judgment decision making (JDM) research that wasn’t really focused on feelings, I had worked with several people who were more about kind of our emotional reactions to various stimuli. So when I was going through graduate school, there were several people working on this idea of the experiential advantage. So this idea that we believe that we get more out of our experiences relative to our material possessions. This was some work that had started from Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich back in the early 2000s and had really taken a hold in marketing over the past few decades. I had run a giant meta analysis on it with Joseph Goodman – had written a follow up paper on it as a result of going to a conference called the Choice Symposium back in 2019. What happened was, after I had worked on this project about the experiential advantage, Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut reached out to me and said, “Look, you seem really interested in these kinds of experiences that are usually based on a lot of social utility,” as one of the drivers of the experiential advantage is this idea that experiences tend to be more social than material possessions, and experiences thus have this sort of greater effective component. So they were kind of interested in finding someone to help with this nostalgia and meta analysis. We recently published it, so I basically spent the last few years working with them and kind of looking at every study in both consumer behavior and psychology and otherwise that had manipulated nostalgia or even measured nostalgia, just to see kind of what drives nostalgia, and what the sort of downstream implications of inducing nostalgia are for things like advertising, product purchase, social connectedness, existential meaning, like a wide array of outcomes. So over the last 10-ish years, I’ve kind of moved from these sort of hardcore attention JDM topics more towards consumer well-being, nostalgia being one example of well-being in the realm of sort of memory-based utility, and how the memories that we reflect on can influence our current feelings and our sort of optimism and all sorts of other kinds of outcomes.

Bhargava: How would you define nostalgia, and how has it historically been used in marketing?

Weingarten: The sort of textbook definition is like a sentimental longing for the past. It turns out there are a lot of more central features to what nostalgia is. Usually, in my mind, nostalgia tends to be more unique. You can’t exactly go back to it. There’s kind of a rosy view of the past. It usually involves some sort of social component. Usually, when you look at nostalgic memories, they typically involve someone else, so the content of nostalgic memories are a bit social. In the late 1980s, early 1990s in marketing, what tended to happen was people would talk about nostalgia as there’s a point in your life at which your preferences solidify and you are typically nostalgic, or that point of your life, or at least the content from that point of your life. So Morris Holbrook, in the 1990s, had this scale which was about trying to capture these individual differences in nostalgia and preferences for nostalgia. The scale is a bit troubled because it confuses nostalgia with a similar idea called declinism. The idea of declinism is that things are getting worse over time. That’s not the same as nostalgia. Nostalgia doesn’t say society is breaking down. That’s sort of a declinism thing. Nostalgia is just about, we have all these memories in our past that once we kind of think about them, they actually reinforce a lot of psychological benefits.

I will sort of note that a lot of the early marketing literature, when it came to nostalgia, at least looked at nostalgia as “look at all these ads” that are typically nostalgia coded like these early Muehling and Sprott 2004 papers, looked at these Kodak camera ads that are more about nostalgic memories or not, and when you framed the ads more as nostalgic, that boosted perceptions of the brand, purchase intentions. This is more in the consumer literature, in the psychological literature, nostalgia, really, about 100 years ago, used to be something bad, like it was kind of confused with homesickness, and people had all these giant review papers and theses about how nostalgia was actually really bad and was maladaptive. Marketing didn’t really grapple with that as much. Psychology has gone through the revolution, in the last 20 or 30 years, they’ve kind of corrected what the definition of nostalgia is. Marketing, early on, viewed nostalgia as another marketing tool, but also it dealt with it both empirically and in terms of looking at how companies use like retro designs to play on nostalgia. So if you ever watch these NBA teams that every so often release throwback jerseys, and they’re sort of very nostalgia coded in terms of they’re meant to bring back an earlier time, they look kind of retro. They always are doing gangbusters on sales. So those are the key points of a lot of nostalgic efforts, or at least efforts from companies that leverage nostalgia. Years ago, Nintendo tried selling new versions of their 1980s-1990s consoles, not even just that, but you know, in terms of even designs trying to leverage nostalgia.

I think one of the sort of interesting divergences in the literature in marketing on nostalgia is that there’s a debate about the extent to which you need to personally identify from your youth with the company or brand in order to feel nostalgic. Some of the earlier research argued, yeah, you know, if there’s this toothpaste brand and you don’t really have much exposure to it, you’re not going to really feel nostalgic for it. You’re not going to have the same boost and feeling warmer or more likely to buy this as you would otherwise, unless you have that identification. But other researchers suggest, look, you know, there’s sort of shared communal nostalgia that is not anything based on what you’ve personally experienced, but might actually be just more on like, “Oh, it’s like an old school rotary phone, it’s kind of like retro or vintage.” People still enjoy that, even if they personally didn’t grow up with rotary phones, etc. So there’s a little bit of a divergence there that I don’t think the literature’s grappled with exactly, but there’s a lot of positive evidence such that consumer preferences are driven through nostalgia, or you can leverage nostalgia to drive consumption. Now, is that something that is endless and can only go one direction? I don’t know. There’s also a risk that you could satiate on nostalgia. There might be like too much nostalgia. People have complained in the last decade about, “Oh, they keep returning the same franchises. Everyone just does old things. Why doesn’t anyone do anything new anymore?” It’s kind of an empirical question, whether or not people can satiate on nostalgia, or is there ever a point at which you’re like, okay, there’s too much nostalgia at once from too many different companies.

Bhargava: You mentioned how it’s more of a social thing than an individual thing. So does nostalgia help consumer well-being in terms of creating more social connectedness, and how does it sort of play out depending on who you’re interacting with, who you’re surrounded with, at the moment of consumption?

Weingarten: Usually, when you induce nostalgia, it strengthens feelings of social connectedness. That’s one of the primary mechanisms. When you look at a lot of these, nostalgia increases purchase intent or other consumption outcome, kinds of things, a lot of the mechanisms or psychological underpinnings of these results are pinpointed to nostalgia’s restoration of feelings of social connectedness. I do want to point out that to my earlier comments, this usually is predicated on the belief that there’s a social activity, then you can feel more excited about doing and feeling like you’re supported and loved, and you might be more willing to take a social risk. For solitary experiences, I’m not exactly sure. Maybe feeling nostalgic pushes you away from doing some beneficial solitary experiences. I’m not sure what those would be, yet. I do reaffirm that of the mechanisms of nostalgia, social elements are one strong one that consumer behavior is really kind of leaned into, but also the existential sorts of benefits are understated in the consumer behavior literature.

Outside of consumer behavior, there’s more focus on the existential benefits of nostalgia, but marketing and consumer behavior has only in the last few years really engaged a lot with meaning and eudaemonic well being. It used to be the case that it was a real struggle to talk about hedonic well being with consumer behavior, but now it’s more like, okay, if you want to get into eudaemonic well being, in the last few years, there’s been some scholarly work within marketing about that, and that’s made it a bit more acceptable. But this social utilities kind of were more pervasive in the last decade or two. Hedonic well being is more about satisfaction with life and the relative ratio of positive affect to negative affect on a daily basis. Like, are you happy or are you sad? Understanding that negative emotions are very different. Sad and angry are very different. They’re not just negative. They have very different appraisals. Eudaemonic well being is more about meaningfulness. Is your life coherent? You are who you were and you don’t have a good, stable sense of self? Do you have a sense that you have a purpose or significance in your life? It’s bolstered by things like feeling you have autonomy and that you’re competent and that you have some of these social connections? So, these are very different from each other.

There’s also a third type of well being that isn’t really explored within consumer behavior, called psychological richness, which is more based on rather than if you’re like, happy or sad, like hedonic well being or have meaning, like eudaemonic well being. Psychological richness is more like, is my life interesting enough to be a movie that’s not monotonous, so to speak? Usually within marketing, consumer behavior, we’re focused on more the first two than the psychological richness thing.

Bhargava: Are there specific conditions in which you’ve seen nostalgia be harmful for a company’s image, or negatively affect purchase intent versus positively affect purchase intent?

Weingarten: It really depends on the context. Like there’s some fine grain details about if people have these sort of shared backgrounds, there’s also a look into certain personality traits or certain types of consumers. Nostalgia might actually not be helpful for driving sales. It turns out that there’s certain consumer traits that are pretty antithetical to nostalgia. If you’re really open to experiences with other people, and you’re really into thinking back and reflecting on the past, then you’re more likely to enjoy nostalgic kinds of leveraging, or at least the use of nostalgia. If you’re someone who really does not want to do social experiences, if you’re more like a lone wolf who doesn’t really like trusting others, or if you really don’t like old vintage sort of looking things, then it can be the case that nostalgic kinds of efforts, or trying to be retro doesn’t really appeal to you in the same way. So that can kind of backfire. There’s a lot of cases like that in literature where, depending on who the customers are, it can kind of work the opposite way, but on average, it is the case that nostalgia tends to kind of increase purchase related consumption outcomes or attitudes towards a brand or advertisement, or just how much people actually engage with a company.

Bhargava: And is there a broader pattern in terms of periods of uncertainty, like economic stress or cultural change, where nostalgia can become even more effective?

Weingarten: I want to point out a few things, because what you’re tapping into is something called the regulatory model of nostalgia, which is this idea that nostalgia can be triggered by threat. Threat can take multiple different forms. It can be kind of physical threat. It can be psychological threat. With economic crises that can lead to economic scarcity and that can trigger people feeling nostalgic. What it can also do is lead to references for nostalgic items. So for example, what you see in the literature is that if you make people feel more disillusioned, if you make people feel like they have a limited time horizon, they’re more likely to report greater feelings of nostalgia, more feelings of let’s enjoy a simpler time. So you can actually, through threat, indirectly lead people to prefer nostalgic products granted when it comes to macroeconomic factors, those are a bit harder to disentangle, but the general notion that these sorts of psychological threats or limited time or loss of control like these can trigger feelings and nostalgia, or just even a preference for nostalgic products. As for when these effects are stronger or weaker, that’s kind of an open empirical question. There’s evidence that supports the regulatory model, this idea that, in response to threat, people feel more nostalgic, and nostalgia helps act as a homeostatic corrective, and thus, like reduces the feelings of distress. That’s sort of a newer idea in the literature. There hasn’t been as much investigation into it, but it’s kind of a complete model of what’s happening with nostalgia, both on the antecedents and on the consequences. But there isn’t as much investigation into when is nostalgia a stronger bomb for psychological distress versus not.

Bhargava: In practice, do we see brands using nostalgia in a way that might not be considered as ethical, since there needs to be some sort of like trigger, as you said, a threat, or do you see brands just responding to current social, cultural or economic forces and using nostalgia in a more positive way?

Weingarten: I’m not immediately convinced that nostalgia would be seen as something unethical to use. Now simultaneously, you could argue to me that, look, you know, it could be that nostalgia is leveraged by political campaigns, sometimes to, like, bring back the olden days, and sometimes that leads to reactionary policy. So like, there I could see an exception where it wouldn’t be ethical. I don’t immediately think a company going back to nostalgia once every so often is bad, but there’s certainly political campaigns that occasionally try and leverage nostalgia, or leverage threat, or perceived economic threat and then try and use nostalgia to get people to vote for them.

Nostalgia is only one of many possible approaches or tactics companies can use. There are so many ways in which companies can try to trigger a threat. You can imagine insurance companies trying to be more forward about crime in your area prior to insurance renewal time. “Oh, wow. You know, insurance would be so helpful to have, or I should really re-up at a higher rate, or I should really increase my protections.” Like it’s sort of a fact of life that people have a disparity between where they want to be and where they are. Some companies play into that a bit differently than others. I don’t know if nostalgia would be the most unethical way to take advantage of that. It might be that we believe our actual and ideal was less pronounced in the past. However, I’m not immediately sure that the nostalgic version of that is as bad as other sorts of tactics.

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