Memories in Marketing
Nostalgia in advertising, communication effects, relationships and critical periods for establishing emotional bonds to collective events
Many perceive a boom in nostalgia and what is retro, especially within the marketing discipline. This thesis studies how nostalgia functions in the advertising context and aims to shed light on which effects there are from nostalgia evoking communication, what connections there are with other important factors as well as aspires to develop the understanding of the underlying psychological aspects and the emotional bonds to events (as nostalgia evoking stimuli in the thesis), which pave the ground for nostalgic emotions. Point of origin has been classical measures of communication effects and models of connections and causality and to these important factors have been added. Results show clear connections and correlations between nostalgia and positive communication effects, even with control for other factors that may interfere. However, the results show that some factors have moderating effects that should be important to take into consideration, namely how well the brand and the event in the ad are perceived to fit the advertising context. Also, as expected, attitude towards the ad proved to have a mediating effect on the relationship between nostalgia and communication effects. Furthermore, the study shows that individuals in the ages 17 to 23 years are more prone to establish emotional links to events, thus a critical period. An interesting finding was a second critical period in the ages ranging from 6 to 10 years. This second critical period does not seem to be directly linked to the stimuli in the experiment (events), rather an indirect nostalgic reaction to that may be linked to the family as an object. In the thesis this concept is discussed as indirect nostalgia.