Getting sentimental about the need for more research on nostalgia in advertising

This year’s Super Bowl, advertising’s ‘big moment’ in the U.S., with average viewership exceeding 100 million, saw very heavy use of ‘A’ list celebrities coupled with humor. This combination was so prevalent as to be almost formulaic (Taylor 2023). That said, advertisers using this formula did make significant effort to stand out and one way to do this was via the use of nostalgic appeals. For example, John Travolta sang in an ad for T-Mobile based on ‘Grease’, and send-ups of old popular movies such as Clueless and Caddyshack that have cross-generational appeal made an appearance.

Interestingly, we saw some new angles on nostalgia as well, at least in the context of the Super Bowl. For example, Popcorners’ ad was a parody of the popular television series ‘Breaking Bad’, featuring the original starts of the series that ran from 2008-2013. In addition, at least a few advertisers, including Uber One and Budweiser used appeals based on more recent music, but music that appeals to people of all ages. In Uber One’s case, rapper Diddy drew on hit songs mainly from the 1990s and 2000s that were popular in the formative years of younger consumers but known to older consumers as well. In contrast, Workforce’s ad featured aging rockers including Ozzy Osbourne, Joan Jett, and Paul Stanley of Kiss, each of whom has some level of popularity across ages.

In an era where sports teams are increasingly updating and changing logos and developing ‘third jerseys’ while marketing and selling ‘throwbacks’ to the public, it is clear that nostalgia is as popular as ever and that marketers are going to new lengths to capitalize on it. Yet, there has been insufficient research on the use of nostalgia in advertising and nuances associated with its effectiveness (Srivastava et al. 2022). This is not to say that there has not been some good work in the area (see Srivastava’s 2022 literature review and Cheng and Yan’s 2022 meta-analysis), but rather that is an understudied topic given its level of relevance.

Indeed, there has been some excellent work done on nostalgia in advertising in different contexts including: its impact on consumer donations (Ford and Merchant 2010); interaction with music (Chou and Lien 2014); impact when past vs. future focused (Barnwell, Collier, and Shanahan 2022); and general effectiveness in different forms (e.g. Pascal, Sprott, and Muehling 2002; Marchegiani and Phau 2010). Several moderators of the impact of nostalgic appeals have been proposed, including: life satisfaction (Ju et al. 2017), affective state (Zhao, Muehling, and Kareklas (2014), involvement (Muehling and Pascal 2012); and social influence (Youn and Jin 2017). In addition, researchers including Marchegiani and Phau (2013), Merchant et al. (2013), and Merchant et al. (2016) have done strong work on scale development, leading the availability of validated measures.

The issue going forward is that nostalgic advertising appears to be getting used more widely and in different forms than ever. Work aimed at identifying the effectiveness of different approaches to nostalgia, additional moderators, and an overall model of the effectiveness of nostalgic appeals is needed submissions are welcome.