Introduction

Nostalgia permeates nearly all contemporary markets and has become a central theme for numerous brands in a wide array of industries including automotive, entertainment, technology, music, food, fashion and tourism. Marketers and consumers appear united in valorizing nostalgia as a meaningful framework for almost any conceivable consumption activity. Contemporary consumers’ nostalgia is found to be triggered by increasingly intense mass migrations, environmental catastrophes, technological discontinuities, accelerating urbanization, economic fluctuations and geopolitical shocks (Goulding 2001; Brown et al 2003; Holak et al 2007; Precourt 2013; Hamilton et al 2014). Studies have consistently shown that in tough times individuals desire to live a simpler life from a personally experienced or imagined past (Baker and Azzari 2020). Our addition to this astute finding is that people engage in nostalgic consumption not only when they experience profound social turmoil and personal alienation in the present, but also heightened anxiousness about the future. Consequently, as the world becomes increasingly unpredictable, marketers intensify their exploitation of consumers’ desire to return to a more peacefully perceived past in order to sell their products. Nostalgia is therefore a highly lucrative marketing strategy (Hartmann and Brunk 2019), and hence important to consumer research because it can create strong and enduring bonds between different market offerings and a wide variety of consumer segments.

This chapter elucidates how nostalgia has been conceptualized and mobilized in different marketing research domains. We do this by scrutinizing how scholars study and understand nostalgia across three different levels of theoretical and empirical observation – individual nostalgia among consumers, producers’ application of nostalgia in advertising and branding, as well as collective nostalgia in broader consumer culture. On this basis, we discuss the role of consumption, production, exchange and markets for nostalgia as a substantive topic, providing examples from extant work. We conclude by offering an outlook on upcoming trends within nostalgia marketing and consumer research.

One of the earliest mentions of nostalgia in marketing research is found in a study on optimizing promotional segmentation strategies for television programming (Gensch and Ranganathan 1974). Programmes such as The Andy Griffith Show and Walt Disney are used to exemplify how nostalgia and traditional values play an important role in this regard. However, such early work does not provide any explicit definition of nostalgia.