Faking the past can be as good as the real thing

My family was on vacation in Maine, and we were hungry. It was late and few joints were open, but we found an Applebee’s. Not the best choice for vegetarians. I took in the décor as I deftly dodged the bacon bits in my salad. There were photos of actor Patrick Dempsey and pitcher Bill Swift, and movie posters with John Travolta and Judd Nelson. There were jerseys from the local high school teams. And everywhere you looked there were framed color photocopies of Maine memorabilia—anything remotely linked to the “pine tree state.” The implication was that Applebee’s and Maine have been joined at the hip for generations.

Applebee’s is from Georgia and is only going on thirty years old, but they are doing an excellent job of burrowing their way into local memories using nostalgia triggers.

I’ve already talked about the powerful positive aspects of nostalgia, but what is important here is that you don’t even have to refer to nostalgia specific to your organization’s past to create that good-old-days feeling. When leveraging the past for marketing purposes, companies usually look to their own history. As Applebee’s points out, you don’t have to be that limited. You also can take advantage of history that is not directly related to you.

Your brain rewards you for remembering

Ok. Tapping into a specific generation’s (or cohort’s) past produces a stronger effect, but you can still get a lot of younger folk dreamy over the 1940s and ’50s. You need not have directly experienced the original sources of nostalgia to be affected by it. The key is to make the nostalgia a game. Like Jeopardy, the brain rewards us for right answers, but instead of money we get a wee dollop o’ dopamine. Putting up a panoply of fake nostalgia is brilliant on Applebee’s part. It got my family thinking. It became a game of guessing exactly how these people were related to Maine. We had fun, and I actually walked away feeling a link between the restaurant and the state.

They are not alone. Restaurant chains T.G.I. Friday’s and Ruby Tuesday are doing the same. Scott Schershel, vice president of Interior Spaces Inc., an art vendor for Ruby Tuesday, says, “We would contact local museums and archival societies to find old photos and other stuff related to the area” to add local flavor.

Bad looks better over time

You don’t have to worry so much about getting all the details correct. The nostalgic mind self-selects for positivity, because it promotes good health. So even things we once didn’t like often look better over time. Or sound better. I hated Van Halen and Neil Young in high school; now I love them. Perhaps I’ve acquired better taste, but I bet my change of heart has more to do with the nostalgic feelings evoked from those rock icons with bad hair.

What’s the new kid to do?

True, it can be much easier to leverage an existing positive memory than to create a new one. But even a newfangled business can take advantage of the good old days. You don’t have to be literal, and you don’t have to have lived through the ’60s to feel them. You can evoke that decade with the typeface Cooper Black and bright colors, the right sound track, and a faded Kodachrome photo. Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland calls this “legislated nostalgia.”

Pepsi and Coke do this well too, often evoking their own real history—the evolution of Pepsi’s bottle and can—and as effectively evoking a faux reality by using Britney Spears in a new commercial evoking past generations’ dress and music. Either way, the message is the same: no matter who you are or where you’ve been, we were there by your side.

In the end, customers want the same thing as marketers: a connection. Your marketing future might be in the past.

Nostalgia marketing can be a cure in dark times

< My great-great grandma (on far right camel) in Egypt, circa 1900

I get a kick out of old family photos. When visiting kin, it is normal for me to take photographs off the walls and extract them from albums so I can take my own digital copies. I ask a lot of questions of older relatives, too. They put up with me until they grow sleepy, then excuse themselves for naps. It makes me feel connected to my greater family. Since I was a boy, I’ve longed to go back in time and meet my ancestors. That’s nostalgia.

Two hundred years ago, nostalgia was associated with melancholy, an important topic in Romanticism. And a hundred years back nostalgia was considered a condition requiring medical treatment. Nowadays, nostalgia is getting a better reputation. Recent studies are finding it can actually be beneficial to our health, as it seems to promote psychological well-being and positive feelings.

The mind works to promote our survival. When required, this can mean remembering negative experiences, but the mind is predisposed to put us in a positive mood. A happier person finds more reasons to live. When negative emotions are present, they are mostly mitigated by positive ones, such as finding triumph over adversity. Some refer to nostalgia as a natural anti-depressant.

Nostalgia is important for another reason: it provides a link between who we were and who we are. It creates a sense of continuity and meaning. Researchers say that “nostalgia is now emerging as a fundamental human strength.”

That is the main reason nostalgia makes a comeback in marketing during tough times (such as now). Our minds are working to keep us positive, and companies are providing comfort through retro marketing.

Last month, Elisabeth Sullivan of Marketing News magazine provided a nice piece on the retro resurgence (available to members through the American Marketing Association). General Mills is reissuing vintage cereal packaging, as are Pepsi and Mountain Dew. Allstate has a “Back to Basics” campaign. Nationwide insurance is giving new prominence to its traditional jingle, “Nationwide is on Your Side.” Target is featuring retro toys such as sock monkeys. Cotton Inc is resurrecting its “Fabric of our Lives” campaign from two decades ago, finding it still resonates with women now in their 20s and 30s. The list goes on, as featured in a recent New York Times article.

How might retro help your marketing aspirations?

1. Dig into your archives. Revive old slogans, jingles, and campaigns. Concentrate on those that represent the peak of your popularity.

2. Take advantage of your own business’s longevity. Remind customers that you’ve been by their side as they grew up, went to school, came of age, etc. This is an opportunity to build trust, so be sure these factors are authentic, and suit your product. For example, be careful of using retro marketing with anything related to high-tech.

3. Retro is more successful when it presents something old in a new way. Louis Vuitton has done a wonderful job of this with a recent campaign, “some journeys change mankind forever,” featuring famous astronauts.

In researching this blog, I found a similar warning about the danger of misusing nostalgia marketing, specifically that if not done right, it can look out-of-date or outmoded. Frankly, I can’t find any examples of this. My recommendation is to jump in and see if the water is to your liking. Nostalgia marketing is not for everybody and not for every project, but for using the past in marketing, there’s no time like the present.

Marketing Nostalgia and Music

Hours before boarding a plane for Bamako in 1989, I purchased the B-52s’ then-newest album, Cosmic Thing. I listened to it all the way to Mali, and I listened to for the next two years as I worked in the sub-Sahel of West Africa. Meanwhile, the B-52s supplied the fitting soundtrack with songs like “Follow Your Bliss” and “Roam.” When I met the woman who became my wife, we moved in together to the tune of “Loveshack.”

I will remember this music for the rest of my life. That is not just a sentimental comment; there is a powerful connection between musical memories and a person’s coming of age.

Indeed, of all types of memories, music is the most powerful. Researchers have found that even after all other ways of communicating have shut down, such as in those with dementia, people still recall and respond to music. Music memory is stronger than verbal memory because music, unlike language, is not located in a specific area of the brain. It is processed throughout many parts.

And of all music memories, music that was popular when a person was a teen and young adult is the easiest to recall. That’s because those years are such a powerful time in developing autonomy: heading off into the world, learning to drive, and finding love. I’ve already warned my boys that they will have Slipknot and Avenged Sevenfold rattling around their noggins for decades.

Petr Janata, a cognitive neuroscientist at University of California–Davis, explains, “What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head. It calls back memories of a particular person or place, and you might all of a sudden see that person’s face in your mind’s eye.”

Just a few bars of the right music can set a tone, making nostalgic music a powerful marketing tool.

Music as Time Machine

Virgin Airlines did an excellent job of appropriating Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” for their twenty-fifth-anniversary ad campaign. In fact, this campaign has been so successful that it prompted the band to make a comeback.

Know to Whom Who You are Singing

Understand your audience, and what songs will appeal to them. But be careful that you are not so focused that you turn off one audience while appealing to another. (Golden oldies may appeal to one cohort, but simply sound old-fashioned to another.) Be careful what you choose. Vitamin-maker Centrum has received grief with their strip tease “Silver” campaign video that aimed to make viewers feel young, but instead makes them feel even older.

Make it Your Own

The adage is that everything in marketing is recycled. True, old ideas can be re-used effectively, but they usually work best when given a new twist. For its sixtieth birthday, Adidas used The Four Seasons’ 1967 hit “Beggin” in their campaign, but gave it a house party twist. The song is remixed by DJ Pilooski, and the scene includes David Beckham, Katy Perry, Missy Elliott, and others. These revamped songs say, “we’ve been around, but we aren’t old.”

Some argue that as music tastes fragment and there are fewer collective musical memories in a generation, this type of nostalgia marketing will fade. That seems a premature obituary to me. As long as music remains a door into human emotions, marketers will find a use for it.