Be it the flavor of your mom’s cooking or hearing a 90s song you loved more than ever or seeing an old photograph of your high school years, nostalgia is a powerful emotion that stirs up sensory inputs, objects, and moments to ignite the yearning for the past that keeps flooding back. This sense of nostalgia can be used by clever marketers to develop a personal and impactful marketing strategy that is appropriately said to be nostalgia marketing.
As the best digital marketing agency in Chennai, we believe nostalgia can be used as an emotion to connect with your brand and associate with positive concepts or ideas from the past. The goal is to show how your brand provides feelings of comfort and security that are triggered by those ideas. While the concept may not seem very new, it has become very more popular in recent times and has been used by various brands. Recently Netflix stirred up the internet with Kate Bush’s iconic song and garnered the most-played track on Spotify when Stranger Things season 4 was released.
How to use nostalgia marketing to connect with your audience?
1. Conduct your research – Discuss with your team and figure out a buyer persona to know various demographics especially understand the things that matter to your audience. For instance, if you’re planning to target millennials then take inspiration from the 90s when Tetris was a big hit or if your audience is Gen X, then try adding funky disco things into your marketing strategy.
2. Make sure you pay attention to the details – When trying to bring a vibe of a specific era to your audience, it’s crucial to get the details right. Starting from getting the music, colors, fonts, and images right. For example, you can’t be using the Papyrus font for the backdrop of an 80s-inspired ad.
3. Time to get creative – You may not be able to license the usage of those iconic shows, characters, or bands that you want from the past but you can add several elements from the specific era into your marketing campaigns to create a surreal connection with your audience and offer them a trip down memory lane through colors, fonts and fashion choices. After all, it’s the small details that matter.
4. Get inspired by your company’s history – Every brand has a story to narrate to its audience. Maybe your brand started in your office or started as a pop-up shop or started during your college years. You need to make sure that including the story of your brand can not only create nostalgia but relate to the audiences with daily situations they have witnessed in the present too.
Examples of brands who have used the nostalgia hook
1. Nintendo – Children from the ’80s and ’90s remember playing Nintendo with their siblings as a fond memory. But the children who have grown up with their siblings also remember the times they have drifted apart due to unknown situations. The latest commercial showcases both of those memories by narrating the story of two brothers who grow apart, argue as teenagers, and then reunite at the end to play Nintendo Switch together.
2. Pepsi Black – Pepsi may not be a household name like Coca-cola but its latest and vintage-inspired ‘Max Taste with Zero Sugar’ campaign promotes the balance of taste and health to make people aware of more positive choices they can make when it comes to beverages. The campaign has created a nostalgic atmosphere by recreating the iconic Cindy Crawford commercial by Pepsi with Jacqueline Fernandez as the leading actress in it.
3. Microsoft – Although Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is not a part of our lives anymore, this 2013 spot for the most-loved web browser received viral recognition and several nominations across the globe. “You might not remember us,” the ad’s narrator begins, “but we met in the ’90s.” The ad is a perfect personification of explorers’ relationship with 90s kids and says how internet explorer will always be a part of everyone’s childhood.
We are the most reliable digital marketing in Chennai that ideate campaigns through nostalgia marketing to help your customers relive simpler times and be part of their return to normalcy. One of the biggest benefits of nostalgic campaigns is that they are inherently shareable and personal. Our team of digital experts at Let’s Goo Social associate positive feelings with your brand through nostalgic campaigns and marketing. Give us a call at +91 9087706000 to know more about how we do it all for your brand.
