Why Nostalgia is so ‘Fetch’ Right Now
By Samira Brophy • 8 mins read
Polycrisis getting you down? Marketers can use nostalgia to connect with consumers. Re-discovering classic advertising assets or leveraging brand heritage can boost brand attention by 8%.
Key takeaways:
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Nostalgia is a tactic that helps meet people’s emotional needs while tapping into aspects of your brand’s history and heritage.
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Utilising aspects of a brand’s history and heritage boosts brand attention of ads by 8%.
Campaigns that help the audience understand the brand or take pains to truly understand the audience drive results. For example:
Renault and Publicis•Poke used nostalgia to increase purchase consideration 52% in three months by revisiting their 90’s ‘Papa Nicole’ ad campaign to reconnect audiences.
KFC achieved a business turnaround over five years, accelerating revenue growth to over £1 billion by tapping into heritage icons and values to create ‘The Right Way’.
‘Long Live the Local’ tapped into place-based nostalgia for the beloved local pub, galvanising the public and MPs to influence the UK Chancellor to stem a beer tax increase, which would force more pubs across the country out of business.
Crayola’s ‘Colours of the World’ products beat revenue projections by 8x by challenging nostalgic rosy retrospection, addressing the past head on, and giving us hope for the future.
Seen someone wearing skirt and trousers Y2K style recently?
Cottage-core, Barbie mania, vinyl, 90’s yearbook challenges on TikTok & Instagram, Stranger Things, Mean Girls, messy mullets… We are recycling culture at a faster rate than our plastic bottles. Why is this?
To say we are overwhelmed is an understatement, 68% of people in the UK agreed that there are so many critical problems in the world today1 we struggle to decide what to focus on. The current polycrisis makes us think about the past as a much more stable and attractive place, which we re-visit for comfort, hope, security, control, connection, and in some case, learnings to help us build a more desirable future.
Social scientist Zygmunt Bauman devised the term ‘Retrotopia’ to describe the societal desire to ‘return’ to an often imaginary, past2. While the far-right seeks a ‘return to the nation-state’, the left looks for a ‘return to equality’. Nostalgia affects everyone. Globally, there’s only an 8-percentage point difference between age groups yearning for their country to be the way it used to, and virtually no differences between those in their mid/late 20’s and those in their mid-70’s.
In Great Britain, 44% of people agree that ‘given the choice, I would prefer to have grown up at the time when my parents were children'. Further evidence of rosy retrospection and a strong desire for the past when faced with an uncertain future.
Nostalgia presents an opportunity for marketers to connect with consumers by tapping into the feel-good factor in their past. Here we explore four ways in which Effie award winners have used nostalgia in their campaigns to drive effectiveness and trigger specific emotional connections.
The effectiveness of nostalgia in numbers
Nostalgia is a means to drive a connection with your audience and leverage your brand fit while doing so, as we know this two-way fit between brand and audience is the most discriminating factor in ad effectiveness.
An analysis of the Ipsos ad testing database shows that utilising aspects of a brand’s history or heritage in advertising provides an 8% bump in brand attention³. But currently only 15% of ads in the UK and 10% of ads globally are leveraging aspects related to the brand’s history or heritage.
Dunkin’s ‘Bennifer’ and Disney’s ‘100 Anniversary’ ads in the 2023 Superbowl did a great job reaching into their brand history to create some of the highest buzz and brand equity shifts Ipsos measured last year. We fully expect to see more nostalgia themes and brand history used in 2024.
While divergent ‘Creative Experiences and Ideas’ are important, we know from assessing thousands of ads that effectiveness isn’t driven by creativity alone, ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ is equally important.
of people agree that ‘given the choice, I would prefer to have grown up at the time when my parents were children.’
Using nostalgia to strike the right chord with your audience
In the UK, 76% of people “feel like things in my country are out of control right now”4. The uncertainty bred by the polycrisis causes us to long for the psychological safety of the past, which can manifest as feelings of control, comfort, connection, hope, or security.
We’ve identified four ways in which Effie award winners use nostalgia to evoke specific feelings for their audience.
Case studies
In summary
To sum up, there are several ways for marketers to boost the effectiveness of their marketing by tapping into nostalgia.
This tactic is effective because we are addressing a stressed-out audience who are looking to the past to find control, connection, security and hope. It provides the opportunity for empathy and fit which we know to be the most discriminating ad experience for effectiveness. Here are some pointers, brought to life using Effie cases to help you make the most of nostalgia:
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Utilise your brand heritage to build connection using highlights people will enjoy reminiscing about.
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Utilise brand heritage to provide comfort and reassurance to people for choosing you.
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Evoke memories around special places or events in people’s lives to inspire them to act.
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Finally, you can also upend nostalgia by showing the past for what it is and provide hope for the future.
Sources
1. Ipsos Essentials, n=10038 people surveyed between Sept 5 to 11, 2023. Respondents were aged 18-74 in Canada and the United States and 16-74 in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, India, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.
2. Zygmunt Bauman (2017) Retrotopia. Polity Press
3. Ipsos Global Ad testing database, 2020 to present. Brand attention refers to the ability of people to recall your ad and brand after they have experienced it in a true to life clutter or distracted setting.
4. Ipsos Essentials, n=1002 people aged 16-74 in the UK
5. Ipsos Global Ad testing database, 2020 to present
Get in touch
Samira Brophy
Senior Director, Ipsos samira.brophy@ipsos.com
Samira is an Ipsos expert on brand and communication work, with 20 years of experience spanning creative and research roles. She leads Ipsos’ earlystage campaign development offer, is a thought leader on ad effectiveness, and works with clients to adopt a misfit mindset and make bolder, highly creative campaigns that audiences value.
