Reconceptualizing Nostalgia Marketing

Abstract

Nostalgia influences popular culture, appears in advertisements, turns out voters, and leads consumers to buy products, brands, and fashions from bygone eras. Yet we still do not have a clear definition of what nostalgia is, which consumers feel nostalgic for certain stimuli over others, or even why nostalgia marketing is effective in the first place. My goal with this dissertation is to establish a better framework for understanding—and answering—these questions. In Essay 1, I argue that marketing researchers and practitioners would benefit from a scale that measures the extent to which consumers feel nostalgic for different time periods (i.e., integral nostalgia). I then develop and validate an 11-item scale to measure integral nostalgia. Specifically, the scale measures three dimensions of nostalgia: warmth, loss, and simplicity associated with the time. The Nostalgia Scale is flexible enough to measure nostalgia for personal (e.g., college years), cultural (e.g., the 1990s), and vicarious (e.g., the Old West) time periods. Across six studies, I demonstrate the validity of the Nostalgia Scale and show that it (a) responds to manipulations of integral nostalgia, (b) better predicts nostalgic choices than alternative scales, (c) predicts which consumers respond more favorably to a nostalgic advertisement, and (d) can be used to test novel predictions about the causes and consequences of feeling nostalgic for a past time. In Essay 2, I discuss how academics and industry experts alike have theorized that nostalgia marketing works because it triggers positive emotions in consumers, which then transfer to whatever brand or product is being marketed. I then argue that this understanding of nostalgia marketing is incomplete. I propose that nostalgia marketing also persuades through a phenomenon I refer to as reflective immersion. Reflective immersion occurs when reflection (e.g., on memories) is so vivid and realistic that it leads to narrative transportation: deep immersion into a story or message. Across six experiments and one study that uses real-world data, I find that nostalgic (vs. non-nostalgic) stimuli and memories evoke reflective immersion, which I operationalize as deeper cognitive processing (pilot study and Study 4) and higher levels of narrative transportation (Studies 1a-3). Importantly, I find that reflective immersion mediates the effect of nostalgic ads on brand attitudes, above and beyond the effect of positive emotions. These findings suggest that reflective immersion plays a role in how nostalgia is formed and in how nostalgia marketing persuades.