Historical and personal nostalgia in advertising text: the Fin de siecle effect.

Barbara B. Stern (Ph.D., City University of New York) is Associate Professor of Marketing, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark Campus. She thanks the Rutgers University Research Council for grant assistance. Special thanks go to the three anonymous reviewers and the editor for

And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine....the smell and taste of things remain poised for a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection (Proust 1928, p. 65).

Social forecasters (Louv 1985; Naisbitt 1982), literary critics (Doane and Hodges 1987), and marketing and advertising researchers (Havlena and Holak 1991; Holak and Havlena 1992; Wallendorf and Arnould 1992; Holbrook and Schindler 1991; Stern 1992) have commented on the increasing visibility of nostalgia themes in the past two decades. These themes seek to tap into consumers' "vast structure of recollection" by reviving promotions, products, and packages associated with the past. Advertisers claim that the use of nostalgia is a way to capitalize on the "gift" of brand equity possessed by recycled advertising (Winters 1990). ln this view, even though consumers can not literally return to the past, they, can, nevertheless, recreate it through nostalgic consumption activities.

Nostalgia has begun to be studied in the consumer behavior field in terms of its definition, origins, and characteristics. The definition is indebted to the psychoanalytic literature, in which the term signifies a bittersweet longing for home (Holak and Havlena 1992). It is considered an emotional state in which an individual yearns for an idealized or sanitized version of an earlier time period. This yearning for yesterday (Davis 1979) is expressed by the individual's attempts to recreate some aspect of the past in present life, either by reproduction of past activities or by the recollection of symbolic representations in memory. However, the past that is vivified is one that never existed, for it is so idealized that any negative traces are screened out (Hirsch 1992). The ambivalence is captured in Jacoby's definition of nostalgia as a longing for a psychically utopian version of the past (1985).

Since most consumer behavior research is predicated on prior research in psychology (see Havlena and Holbrook 1991) and in sociology (Davis 1979), it focuses on nostalgia as a consumer response (Havlena and Holak 1991; Holbrook and Schindler 1989). The goal of much of this research is to measure the relationship of individual characteristics to nostalgia-proneness and to identify characteristics of the individually perceived nostalgic experience (Holbrook and Schindler 1989). We suggest that another view of nostalgia -- one that sheds new light on the phenomenon by placing it in a cultural context -- can be gained by examining it from the stimulus side.

To this end, the paper uses literary criticism to locate manifestations of nostalgia in advertising text within the broader domain of its literary heritage. The rationale for drawing from literary criticism is that the form (or genre) of advertising -- its executional format (see MacKenzie and Lutz 1989) -- is often indebted to literary predecessors (Stern 1988, 1990a). The purpose of stimulus-side analysis is to contextualize the concept of nostalgia in advertising text by tracing its lineage. In this way, an analysis of the roots of adverting nostalgia can foster increased awareness of its encoded formal dimensions -- what it is -- and thus contribute to better assessment of what it does (Scott 1989).

The paper begins by tracing the re-appearance of nostalgia in our own era (see Havlena and Holak 1991 and Holak and Havlena 1992 for review) to its nearest historical antecedent -- the late nineteenth century fin de siecle or "end of century" cultural movement. Next, it addresses a taxonomic issue by identifying romance fiction as the common ancestor of two current nostalgia types -- historical and personal. These separate but related types are then distinguished by examination of their characteristic elements and their relation to consumer responses of empathy and identification. Finally, the paper concludes with suggestions for additional research in three areas: content analysis, gender differences, and consumer values.

At the outset, we note that the paper defines "communication" generously, including a wider variety of promotional phenomena than advertisements alone. Nostalgia pervades commercial media, for it is found in direct mail catalogues (Past Times and Wireless: A Gift Catalog for Fans and Friends of Public Radio), retailing ventures (Ralph Lauren stores), outdoor advertising (Coppertone's 1957 "Don't be a paleface" billboard in Miami), magazines (Joe Franklin's Nostalgia), and television programs (Ira Gallen's "Biograph Days/Biograph Nights"). Accordingly, while we accept Marshall Blonsky's idea that nostalgia themes (or "tapes") are found in television commercials (Whalen 1983), we do not view these themes as limited to that medium. Further, advertising "text" is also construed broadly to include a gestalt of pictorial (Steiner 1988) and musical (Holbrook and Schindler 1989) message cues in addition to verbal ones. The reason for this multi-media approach is that it allows for fuller exploration of the historical sources of modern commercial nostalgia.

Fin de siecle Nostalgia: Romance and Sentiment

Romance as a form ... expresses a transitional moment, yet one of a very special type: its contemporaries must feel their society torn between past and future . . . The archaic character of the categories of romance suggest that this genre expresses a nostalgia for a social order in the process of being undermined and destroyed (Jameson 1975, p. 158).

An approach to advertising via its literary heritage permits a view of contemporary nostalgia (Stern 1991b) in light of its precedent in problems, themes, and metaphors characteristic of the late nineteenth century. The emergence of nostalgia as a dominant theme at the ends of centuries has been called the fin de siecle effect, "endism" (Showalter 1990), and the "end-of-the-century malaise" (Miller 1990). The phenomenon expresses cultural anxiety about the experience of discontinuity associated with an era that is, in Matthew Arnold's words, "between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born" ("Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse," ll. 85-86). In such a transitional time period (Abrams 1988), particularly when a century is metaphorically dying, people tend to look to the past to find emotional sustenance and security. Public awareness of an era's symbolic death signals a plunge into the unknown that prompts glances backwards at a past recollected as less threatening and more comforting than the present (Davis 1979). Nostalgia appears in the preceding century's fin de siecle movement in literature and art (Showalter 1990; Stern 1991b) as one of several escapist themes, others being sensuality, aesthetic refinement, and abuse of drugs and/or alcohol. These themes express what Pater called an "incurable thirst for the sense of escape" (in Whissen 1989, p. 73) from the desolateness of contemporary life. Nostalgic escapism is found in the works of writers and artists who were part of the "decadent" or "aesthetic" movement of the late nineteenth century -- Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Hermann Hesse, and William Morris, among others (Dowling 1986). The decadents' consciousness of standing at a point when a vital epoch was ending fostered their spiritual longing (see Havlena and Holak 1991) for a fantasized home, one that existed only in imagination (Whissen 1989). The "fin de siecle effect" (Showalter 1990) suggests that since the twentieth century is approaching not simply the end of a century, but also the end of a millenium, media manifestations of nostalgia can be expected to grow increasingly evident. As Louv notes, nostalgia at present can "certainly be thought of as a national condition. We are awash in nostalgia" (1985, p. 6).

Additionally, an unprecedented demographic coincidence seems destined to exacerbate the yearning for the past (Davis 1979). At the very same time that the millenium is approaching, the largest group in the population -- the baby boomers -- is also beginning to face its own mortality, signalled by reaching the age of fifty. This disproportionately large population cohort, long courted by marketers for its youth, is now entering middle age (Kerr 1991). The marketing strategy of appealing to an aging market by offering it mementos of youth is an adaptive response to the increase in personal mortality that people feel as they grow older. The 50 to 65 year old age group is especially likely to show attachment to possessions that evoke pleasurable memories (Wallendorf and Arnould 1988), for recollection of past joys escalates as the likelihood of future ones diminishes (Belk 1988). These senior citizens form an especially nostalgia-prone consumer group, as do baby boomers (Holbrook and Schindler 1989; Louv 1985), and when both groups are one and the same, a "double whammy" effect seems likely. When demographic factors converge with a temporal event that has not occurred in a thousand years, an upsurge in nostalgia themes is not surprising.

Examination of the elements of advertising themes -- of necessity constrained by time and space -- can best be undertaken by turning to literary antecedents, for there the themes are developed in full. The nostalgia themes that surface in fin de siecle literature ultimately descend from the medieval romance, itself a transitional literary form noted for archaic themes and values. Like the end of the twentieth century, the fragmented and archaic world of the medieval period that gave rise to the great chivalric romances was a time when a population "terrorized by barbarian incursions increasingly withdrew into the shelter of local fortresses" (Jameson 1975, pp. 160-161). By the eighteenth century, romance themes branched off into two types of nostalgia (Radway 1984), one concerned with the retreat to the fortress of the past (historical romance) and the other with retreat to the safety of one's primal home (sentimental novel).

While both types express wish-fulfillment or utopian fantasies about the past, they are differentiated by distinctive formal elements. These elements -- setting, plot, action, characters, values, and tone -- are indebted to the dimensions of the historical romance and the sentimental novel that reappear in nostalgia advertisements. The table's formal elements are briefly defined as follows (see Abrams 1988): "setting" is the geographical locale and historical time of a text; "plot" is the structural sequence of events; "actions" are the events themselves; "characters" are the invented personages enacting those events; "values" are the moral qualities displayed by the characters in action; and "tone" is the attitude of the author and/or the character toward him/herself, other people, and society in general. The "perceiver's mental process" and the "perceiver's response" are responses originally imputed to readers of nostalgia fiction by literary critics and here adapted for advertising purposes. We turn first to historical nostalgia, which has been less discussed in the advertising research literature, although much used by advertising creatives.

Historical Nostalgia: The Way It Was

Historical nostalgia expresses the desire to retreat from contemporary life by returning to a time in the distant past viewed as superior to the present. No matter whether the long-gone era is represented as richer and more complex than today (for example, in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind) or as simpler and less corrupted (for example, in Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley), it is positioned as an escape from the here and now (Whissen 1989). These escape fantasies are adaptable to advertising executions because they can be compressed to depict the "static, pictorial, |and~ contemplative... attributes" (Jameson 1975, p. 139) of products, experiences, or services. Since the format of many advertisements encapsulates a moment of frozen time in a "consumption tableau" (Marchand 1985), a closer look at the formal attributes reveals the nature of advertising's borrowings. The distinctive feature borrowed from historical prose romances is the use of historical events and personages as central characters and plots in the narrative. In historical romances, the centrality of the setting -- often exotic both geographically and temporally -- is integral to the story, not mere background. Historical nostalgia's most important temporal element is presentation of the past as the time before the audience was born. The plots typically return to the world of myth, where the characters enact familiar archetypal roles. Although the characters are human rather than divine (Frye 1973), their actions symbolically project the raw materials of the unconscious -- desires, hopes and fears -- that also comprise the materials of myth, dream, ritual, and folklore (Abrams 1988). The point of quasi-mythological characters, exotic settings, and fantastic plots is to recreate the past as a golden age, for these executions often rely on the typological form of classical allegory (Stern 1990b) to envelop long-gone events in a "redeemingly benign aura" (Davis 1979, p. 14). The glow haloes the characters as well, insofar as they are portrayed as idealized men and women holding fast to heroic values, particularly those celebrated in the chivalric quest romances (loyalty, honor, mercy, obedience).

Table 1
Historical and Personal Nostalgia
                      HISTORICAL             PERSONAL
LITERARY ANTECEDENT   Historical             Sentimental
                      romance                novel
SETTING               exotic                 familiar
                      long ago               home and hearth
                      far away
PLOT                  quest                  birth/rebirth
                      linear                 cyclical
                      goal-oriented          return to womb
ACTION                adventure              realistic story
                      fantasy                lifelike incidents
                      "fairyland" wonders
CHARACTERS            idealized               real-life
                      aspirational            recognizable
                      role-models             ordinary people
VALUES                heroic ones             "everyman" ones
                      courage, honor          love, security
                      mercy                   nurturance
TONE                  melodramatic            sentimental
                      exaggerated             tearful
PERCEIVER'S MENTAL
PROCESS               imagination              memory
PERCEIVER'S RESPONSE  empathy                  identification
                      bonding with an          development of
                      "other"                  self-image

Historical Nostalgia and Modern Consumption: Victoria and J. Peterman

Modern historical nostalgia promotions also feature a quest, but one aimed at a successful consumption experience. For consumers unable to possess authentic and scarce commodities from the past, these promotions offer possession by surrogacy -- the "sizzle" of pastness is added to commonplace contemporary products. This type of promotion appeals to the consumer's desire to identify with a past era perceived as a repository of desirable traits and/or values (see Belk 1988). The goal is to enable consumers to "bask in the glory of the past in the hope that some of it will magically rub off" (Belk 1988, P. 149), a kind of totemic identification permitting the extension of the self backwards into history. Two cases in point are Victoria Magazine and the J. Peterman Company "Owner's Manual," a direct mail catalogue. Here, the "tonality" of the advertising -- its feel and focus -- is designed to persuade consumers that the products possess "value added" because they are associated with an idealized past (Mayer 1991, p. xiii). This intangible benefit is aimed at convincing consumers (O'Keefe 1990) that the nostalgia-tinged offering is different from (and better than) its competitors.

Victoria Magazine exemplifies nostalgia for a single historical epoch, since the nineteenth century dominates not only the advertisements, but also the editorial content, the photography, the colors and graphic styles, and the layouts. The magazine is dedicated to an idealized Victorian Age, one hailed as "an era of timeless charm, enduring quality, beauty and elegance....a breath of relief from this fast paced world" (promotional insert 1991). The benefit promised to the readers is a "return to the loveliness of yesteryear" in those domestic spheres traditionally demarcated as women's place (Welter 1966) -- "home, garden, fashions, beauty, cooking, entertaining, crafts, and collectibles" (cover, September 1991). The articles offer abundant details to create historical verisimilitude, for they describe and illustrate such topics as the Victoria Theatre in Dayton, Ohio; Helen Hayes's experiences playing the role of Queen Victoria; the revival of calling cards; and interior design reflecting "The Warmth of the Past" (Fabricant 1989). The narrow historical frame of reference apparently sustains short-term consumer interest, for Victoria's circulation is rising: it was up 7.6% in 1991 (to 868,627) (Teinowitz 1991). Although these figures do not reveal the subscriber turnover rate or predict continued interest in single-theme periodicals, they do indicate growth in readership as well as in number of advertising pages since the 1987 launch (Foltz 1990).

However, nostalgia for a historical era need not be narrowly limited to one century alone, as The J. Peterman Company "Owner's Manual" demonstrates. The catalogue's reliance upon history is nothing if not eclectic. Rather than constraining itself to any single time or place, this catalogue celebrates a more diffuse notion of pastness itself. The copy emphasizes the association of products -- many of which are quite basic items of men's and women's apparel (denim coats, cotton polo shirts, white blouses) -- with heroes and heroines of bygone days. As the prices indicate, the halo of pastness does not come cheap: for example, a basic shirt similar to Peterman's "Polo Shirt, circa 1472" selling at $41.00 is half the price (from $18.00 to $21.00) in other catalogues, notably Lands' End, L.L. Bean, and J. Crew.

The statement of company philosophy articulates the implicit justification for higher prices: "People want things that are hard to find. Things that have romance, but a factual romance, about them....Clearly, people want things that make their lives the way they wish they were" (Fall 1991, p. 1, underlining mine). While "factual romance" is an oxymoron, the copy is designed to fulfill consumers' fantasies by encouraging the notion that if they spend the extra money on Peterman products, they will own a piece of the past. The purchase of objects endowed with the spiritual aura of a culturally valued era makes ownership of a memento from the past available to consumers not only by purchase of rare antiquities, but also by purchase of mass-produced products endowed with history by association.

One example is a unisex shirt, headlined "Out of Africa, circa 1906" (Fall 1991, p. 37). The reference is to Africa during the period 1906 to 1939, when European settlers flocked to a new world to start life over again. Nostalgia for this epoch exemplifies "imperialist nostalgia" (Rosaldo 1989, p. 68) -- a colonizing culture's longing for the way of life that colonization has destroyed. This paradoxical yearning underlies the depiction of Africa as a new world -- a Garden of Eden -- characterized by "days of laughing, dancing, talking all night; ostrich omelettes the morning after....great luxury, great simplicity." The advertising copy for the shirt vivifies memories of the long-departed earthly paradise: "One year ago we received by Registered Mail an old shirt, circa 1906. Mailed from that place and from those days....With fear and respect we had this 1906 shirt taken apart, stitch by stitch; then meticulously copied." It takes on symbolic value by association with a vanished Eden -- "there will never be anything else like it again" -- and in this way, the buyer does not simply purchase a garment, but, more importantly, buys a bit of the past that other shirts do not possess.

In this way, historical nostalgia aims at transfiguration of the world of everyday consumption reality -- "paradise bought" (Louv 1985) -- into paradise regained (Jacoby 1985). Consumption becomes a "vehicle of transcendant experience" (Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry 1989, p. 2), enabling the consumer to transcend his/her discrete biological existence in time and to feel connected to the continuous flow of humanity. Literary critics have suggested that readers respond to such historical sacralization by empathizing with the characters and actions (Abrams 1988). In view of the research interest in empathetic consumer responses, it is worth examining the reader-response school of literary criticism (Stern 1989) to ascertain how nostalgic stimuli can stimulate empathy with advertising text.

Consumer Effects: Empathy and Imagination

Empathetic audience responses to literature were first discussed by Aristotle. He hypothesized that audiences at Greek tragedies experienced cathartic relief -- purgation of feelings of pity and terror -- in the course of viewing a dramatic "imitation" or representation of the characters' emotions (Fergusson 1961). Aristotle conjectured that the process was activated when audiences recognized a common thread of humanity binding them to the characters, and experienced a spiritual cleansing (Fergusson 1961, p. 35) comparable to purification after religious ceremonies such as the Dionysian rites. The empathetic response may manifest itself as the perceiver's experience of the characters' thoughts and actions and even as the experience of the characters' emotional and physiological states. This kind of response can readily be observed today, by witnessing the extent to which perceivers vicariously participate in fictional worlds created by movies -- patrons cry along with characters in "tearjerkers," scream with those in horror shows, and shout dialogue at on-screen characters in teen films.

In advertising as in the movies, empathetic participation occurs when the audience "feels into" (fr. German einfuhlung) a person, object, or activity depicted (Abrams 1988). Empathy (Eisenberg et al. 1989) flows from the consumer's projection of him/herself into the identity of the character and his/her vicarious participation in the consumption experiences that the advertisement portrays (Boiler, Olson and Babakus 1991). When historical nostalgia is at work, empathy calls for a particularly robust leap of imagination on the part of perceivers (Poulet 1956). The reason is that since the era depicted predates the perceivers' real-life experiences, they must reconstruct a time that they could not conceivably recollect from personal memory. The key that unlocks the imagination is verisimilitude -- the illusion of reality conveyed by faithfully depicted details. These comprise the setting cues such as scenery and props (including costume, architecture, interior decor, and so forth) chosen to convey time, place, character, and culture. Consumption artifacts figure importantly as cues, for products associated with a particular era concretize whatever version of the past is displayed (Havlena and Holak 1991).

Advertising strategy that uses historical nostalgia to tell stories about products, brands, and consumption styles aims at stimulating consumer empathy with this fictive past. If vicarious participation in a historical era can be evoked, the imaginative adventure may create positive beliefs about the current personal relevance of the product. These beliefs are often associated with subjective or "feelings" claims, rather than with objectively verifiable ones (Deighton, Romer, and McQueen 1989), for empathetic consumer responses to advertisements have been found to occur in reference to emotion-oriented messages. Although the process is not yet fully understood, empathy with advertisements that evoke feelings has been found to influence persuasion by recruiting the reader's imagination to "perform" the meaning (Deighton, Romer, and McQueen 1989). The appeal to empathy seems able to forestall counter-argument, for insofar as non-cognitive claims portray products as emotionally satisfying, they may deflect consumers from recourse to rational argument. In this way, a successful nostalgia advertisement may persuade consumers to engage in a consumption activity by stimulating an imaginative recreation of a past golden age associated with the product.

Personal Nostalgia: This is the Way I Was

Just as historical nostalgia idealizes the imaginatively recreated past, so too does personal nostalgia idealize the personally remembered past. The locus of memory is the sentimentalized "home" of one's childhood (Davis 1979), recollected in adult life as the font of warmth, security, and love. This type of nostalgia has been categorized in psychological works since the seventeenth century as a clinical condition (Havlena and Holak 1991) afflicting those who become quite literally "homesick." The extreme sadness of homesickness represents a desire to return to the womb -- the pre-natal state -- to recapture the perfect innocence and comfort unattainable in the external world. It is important to note that personal nostalgia does not depend upon an actual happy childhood, but, rather, on the reconstructed fiction of one. Truman Capote's fiction, for example, demonstrates this reconstruction, for it is "tinged with nostalgia, a yearning for a serene and smiling past that he himself had not known" (Clarke, in Whissen 1989, p. 75). Even though Capote suffered maternal abuse -- his mother habitually locked him in strange hotel rooms and disappeared for long periods of time -- he devoted much of his adulthood to "perpetual mourning" for the loss of his childhood. Interestingly, critical evaluation of personal nostalgia as a "sick" response may be related to derogation of its literary antecedent -- the sentimental novel -- as a sickly genre marred by overindulgence in pathos. Despite this derogation, we suggest that personal nostalgia in advertising might better be viewed non-judgmentally to explore the characteristics inherited from the sentimental novel. The most important of these characteristics is the depiction of a time in one's own past, anywhere from ten to seventy years before "now" (Davis 1979; Holbrook and Schindler 1989). The settings are familiar, often recollected scenes of home that summon up fond memories. The plots are cyclical rather than linear, and the birth/rebirth pattern emphasizes the circularity of human existence. The action tends toward realism rather than toward fantasy or absurdism (Stern 1990a), and the characters are recognizable as ordinary people (not, for example, gods or supermen/women). They are often surrogate family figures acting out relational roles (mother, father, siblings, and so forth). Their values are those of "everyman" and "everywoman" in daily existence -- especially the nurturant cluster of love, comfort, and security -- as opposed to epic values characteristic of heroic figures in historical nostalgia.

Personal Nostalgia and the Baby Boomers: Products, Packages, Promotions

Consumption experiences that offer a taste of youth to ordinary people (Miller 1990) fuel the current personal nostalgia boom. The predominance of fortysomething and older target consumers is so novel in American society that demographers have given a name to this large and affluent segment of graying baby-boomers -- "Grumpies, grown-up mature professionals" (Kerr 1991, p. D1). As marketers seek to command this segment's attention, they increasingly turn to reminders of the decades of youth, especially the 1950s and 1960s. Identification with remembered consumer icons links the maturing self to its youth (Belk 1988), for just as historical nostalgia reconnects 1990s adults to the distant past, so too does personal nostalgia reconnect them to their younger days.

One way that marketers invoke personal nostalgia to offer an actual taste of youth to diet-conscious adults is by miniaturizing well-loved but fattening products. For example, miniature Oreos and mini-ice cream bars provide the benefit of remembered taste without the caloric content (Kerr 1991). The appeal to personal nostalgia is also evident in the revival of packaging from the past notably the distribution of Coca-Cola in its original green-tinted glass bottles. The popularity of Coke in the old-fashioned bottles has been attributed to the consumer's desire to mine his/her past for enjoyable memories that can be shared generationally. In the words of one consumer, "I drank these growing up -- wouldn't it be great to share it with my son?" (Walker 1991, p. 15). Nostalgia appeals can also be seen in new advertising campaigns that revive old ones -- for example, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company's re-release of the 1968 "Excedrin Headache" spot featuring a busy housewife versus a berserk washing machine (Winters 1991).

Personal Nostalgia and Martha Stewart Living: The Industry Guru

The investment of products with nostalgia need not be limited to advertising campaigns alone, for consumption gurus such as Alexandra Stoddard and Martha Stewart have made the yearning for "home" a multimedia event. Stoddard identifies the importance of "home" as the only safe haven in troubled times: "At the end of the day, no matter who we are or what we do, we want to go home" (Cantwell 1991, p. 49). But it is Stewart who has turned nostalgia into an industry, in which books and videos on living well (Brady 1991) are promoted by a weekly spot on the Today show, and activities on that show are tied in with articles in a periodical -- Martha Stewart Living. This magazine is designed to encourage the audience to re-experience recollected activities, experiences, and emotions by filtering them through the rosy haze of selective memory. The September 1991 issue -- the first one published by Time-Warner -- demonstrates the integration of editorial text, visual cues, and product/promotional offerings around a central personal nostalgia theme.

The emphasis on home begins with the opening editorial -- "A Letter from Martha" (1991, p. 4) -- thanking "the people I think of as my new 'extended family'" for the ideas and enthusiasm that made the pilot issues successful. Martha's thank-you positions her readers as members of a large and loving surrogate family, in which the bond of common interests forms a supportive network that connects "old friends" in a family-like structure. Relational values such as warmth, love, and sharing dominate the articles, which are designed to exemplify the Martha mystique of recapturing the child within. The keynote is sounded in the first article -- "Summer" -- when the season is defined as one of "childhood joys recaptured" (p. 41), replete with memories of "a glass of lemonade," "tales of towering sand castles," and "starlit picnics."

Each of the following articles reiterates this pattern by beginning with a reference to the pleasure of memories. For example, "Summer Supper" tells the reader that "your own summer supper may be sophisticated or simple, but it can easily provide memories rich enough to last a thousand and one nights" (44). An article on "Ice Cream" is headed, "capture summer's sweet, fleeting nature with homemade ice-cream treats," and it goes on to remind readers that ice-cream "reigns supreme on sweltering summer afternoons when the chime of a passing Good Humor truck and the whir of a frosty blender are treasured seasonal melodies" (p. 62). Similarly, "A Guide to Grilling" begins with the question, "Remember the first time your father let you hold his trusty grilling tongs as the family sat round the backyard table, about to enjoy a Saturday feast?" (p. 72). The final editorial commentary -- Stewart's bylined "Remembering" column, called "Down by the Seashore" -- sums up the nostalgic view of feelings and family. It begins with Stewart's personal nostalgic reflection: "Our annual family vacation took place every August in Babylon, Long Island, at the home of Uncle Mark and Aunt Victoria." It ends -- as her opening letter began -- with the concept of family: "We never heard the phrase extended family, but that was what it was -- and how it should be" (p. 123).

Like Victoria, this one-theme magazine has shown short-term success. Its rate base was 300,000 at launch (July/August 1991) and rose to 500,000 in six months, accompanied by an increasing number of advertising pages (Donaton 1991). While these figures do not reflect the periodical's ability to sustain reader interest over time, early support from consumers suggests that boredom has not yet set in. At present, Martha Stewart media enterprises are in a growth mode. The product -- a Martha Stewart lifestyle dedicated to the recapture of childhood love -- uses personal nostalgia as a broad-based marketing strategy unifying an entrepreneurial conglomerate. Stewart's role is that of a guide to consumption, for she shows her audience how memories of the past can be transfigured and recreated in the present by purchasing her advice along with the advertised goods and services.

Consumer Effects: The Self-Concept and Idealization

The appeal to remembered youth differentiates personal nostalgia from historical nostalgia, for here idealization of one's personal past is the goal, and memory is the operational process. In information processing terms, memory is guided by the self-concept -- an individual's totality of cognitive generalizations about the self or "self-schema" (see Hong and Zinkhan 1992) derived from past experience. These schema direct the memory processes of encoding, organizing, and retrieving self-related information. In American culture, products are important signifiers of self-concept, for objects serve as reminders of events in the personal past (Wallendorf and Arnould 1988). They are "personal storehouses of meaning" (Wallendorf and Arnould 1988, p. 533) that contain the raw materials of the self, out of which an individual forges a self-concept (see Belk 1988; Sirgy 1982). This self-concept incorporates bits and pieces of brand images remembered from the personal past (Poulet 1956) that help to locate the sense of who we are today in memories of who we used to be and of what products we used at that time.

However, nostalgia associated with possessions (Belk 1988; Wallendorf and Arnould 1988) is not merely a neutral filter through which the self can be observed (Belk 1988; Sirgy 1982). On the contrary, it has been compared to "a readily accessible psychological lens...for the never ending work of constructing, maintaining, and reconstructing our identities" (Davis 1979, in Belk 1988, p. 150). The lens functions in the individual's task of managing his/her self-concept (Belk 1988) as an idealizing mechanism through which memories can be selectively filtered in order to create a desired or ideal self-concept. Personal nostalgia allows the re-shaping of incidents and relationships stored in memory so that they yield pleasure in the recollection, even if they were not pleasurable at the time they were experienced. To this end, an actual unhappy childhood may be sanitized as Capote did by repressing memories of a dysfunctional family life, and instead rewriting childhood as an idyllic state. Advertising performs a similar reconstructive function when it offers consumption experiences as a means to recover the ideal self.

Advertising Effects of Personal and Historical Nostalgia

Situations in which personal versus historical nostalgia are likely to be more effective differ in terms of the benefit claim, product category, and dimension of the consumer self-concept that is invoked. Personal nostalgia seems more useful for claims associated with "cocooning" or "nesting" products that are socially inconspicuous, but that provide the benefit of comfortability. They speak to the consumer's ideal self-concept, that imaginatively reconstructed state of perfection associated with childhood. The force of the ideal self-concept is such that (Louv 1985) childhood evokes the state of innocence as an aspect of the self that an individual is motivated to create in memory (Hong and Zinkhan 1992). Examples of products that make claims based on personal nostalgia are "comfort foods" such as candy (Rascals), cereal (Kellogg's Rice Krispies), hot drinks (Ovaltine), and soft sweet desserts (Rennet Junket) -- products that advertising slogans associate with the baby boomers' past. In this way, personal nostalgia sacralizes commonplace food items whose consumption revives memories of good times.

Historical nostalgia, in contrast, seems better suited to socially visible products, status claims, and appeals to the consumer's ideal social self-concept, Such products are used or consumed in public, lend status to the user, and contribute to the self-image that the consumer would like to project to other people. An intangible product benefit is that the consumer is perceived by others as possessing status because s/he owns tasteful, expensive, and socially valued objects. The products in the Peterman catalogue illustrate the use of historical nostalgia to add value to clothing -- a highly visible product category -- in the form of mini-stories about a product's quasi-historical provenance. Ralph Lauren's product line elevates nostalgia to even higher price points, for his retail "environments" (Goldberger 1992) are fashioned to replicate centuries-old English manor houses and clubs. Consumption takes place in settings that connote tradition, time-honored values, and old money, and status is bestowed not simply by purchase of the products, but by the entire consumption experience -- a gestalt in which even the air that the consumer breathes is scented with potpourri evocative of English gardens.

Future Research Issues

Since little research has focused on the role of nostalgia in advertisements, additional avenues of exploration may contribute to greater understanding of advertising stimuli as well as of imputed consumer responses. To this end, several directions for future research can be identified that borrow insights from the study of nostalgia in literature and apply them to the study of advertisements over time, gender differences, and consumer values.

Content of Advertisements: Time Patterns of Nostalgia Themes

The study of nostalgia themes in advertisements might well begin by seeking out empirical evidence for the occurrence and temporal patterning of both forms of nostalgia. The method of content analysis (Kassarjian 1977) applied to a longitudinal data base can be employed to determine the incidence of historical and personal nostalgia themes and evidence of their chronological flux. Precedent exists in the construction and use of century-long data bases to examine both time-oriented appeals (Gross and Sheth 1989) and values in advertisements (Leiss, Kline, and Jhally 1986; Belk and Pollay 1985). Extending this tradition to study nostalgia in the context of changing time-oriented appeals permits a closer look at different types of nostalgia and a more rigorous examination of hypothesized fin de siecle effects. Although this concept has intuitive appeal, it calls for empirical demonstration in advertising (if not in literature) by means of study of the pattern of nostalgia advertisements in the final decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some propositions for future research are:

P1A: Personal nostalgia themes are likely to reference a time from ten to seventy years be fore the present.

P1B:Historical nostalgia themes are likely to reference a time before seventy years ago.

P2: Nostalgia themes are likely to increase in advertisements of the last twenty years of a century.

P3: Historical and personal nostalgia themes in advertisements are likely to be correlated with product categories that differ on the basis of more or less social visibility.

Gender Differences: Nostalgia Themes as Stimuli

Gender differences in the selection of objects evaluated as "favorite" because of associations with the past have been found (Wallendorf and Arnould 1988), with women choosing items made for them or given to them by others, and men choosing art works or other functional and consumer items. Continued study of nostalgia effects on consumers (Holbrook and Schindler 1989) requires addressing the possibility that each gender may experience and/or express nostalgia in different ways. This issue relates to the socially-constructed nature of gender, for while each sex may perceive nostalgia, each may evaluate different stimuli as nostalgic and may articulate nostalgia responses with differing intensity. While some past research has found men to be more prone to nostalgia (see Havlena and Holak 1991), the idea of nostalgia as a sex-specific experience calls for re-examination of gender effects from the stimulus-side. In this regard, literary precedent suggests that men and women will respond differently to different nostalgic elements in advertisements just as they respond differently to different "romance" or fantasy literature (Stern 1991a). For example, men's adventure literature (Cawelti 1976) -- techno-thrillers -- not only contains different elements from those in women's romance literature (Radway 1984), but also elicits different responses in each sex (Showalter 1990). Some propositions for future research are:

P4: Male and female responses to advertising stimuli designed to evoke personal and historical nostalgia are likely to differ.

P5: Male and female evaluations of objects from the personal and from the historical past as nostalgic are likely to differ.

P6: Male and female articulations of nostalgia responses are likely to differ in intensity.

Nostalgia and Cultural Values: A Warped Lens?

Last, and perhaps most important, only when nostalgia in advertisements is fitted into the context of the culture at large can the question of its influence on consumer values be considered. If nostalgia is a psychological lens, as Davis contends (1979), the issue is whether it clarifies or distorts whatever lies beneath. Rosaldo points to the dark side of nostalgia -- its ability to make "domination appear innocent and pure" (1989, p. 68). He notes imperialist nostalgia's racist strain, whereby colonialism is equated with progress (1989, p. 68):

In this ideologically constructed world of ongoing progressive change..."we" (who believe in progress) valorize innovation, and then yearn for more stable worlds, whether they reside in our own past, in other cultures, or in the conflation of the two. Such forms of longing thus appear closely related to secular notions of progress.

Nostalgia has also been associated with sexism, expressing a patriarchal society's longing for the supposedly vanished days of male supremacy (Doane and Hodges 1987). Both historical and personal nostalgia have been condemned as vehicles for reinforcing reactionary and anti-social values. Historical nostalgia is criticized as a form of idealization in which people sustain values that never existed or whitewash social ills that did (Rosaldo 1989), and personal nostalgia is critized as a form of sentimentalization in which people retreat to the security blanket of childhood and thereby avoid the risk-taking necessary to achieve maturity. Both types of nostalgia in advertising can thus laud distorted consumer values by legitimizing falsely flattering portrayals of a fictionalized self and society (Bridgewood 1986).

Nostalgia's fictionalizing process is seductive, in that it offers consumers a sanitized version of the past as an escape from a problem-laden present. Advertisements condemned as "revisionist nostalgia" rewrite history by encouraging (McCracken 1986) individuals and societies to believe in idealized visions of a fabricated golden past that masks societal ills. One example is The Maxwell House advertisement for "1892 ground coffee" (Garfield 1991, p. 50) set in a 1947 postwar victory celebration. The parade praises "the good old days that never were," ignoring the racism, sexism, and chauvinism prevalent in the postwar era (Garfield 1991, p. 50):

... |when~ Polio was epidemic, Jim Crow was thriving, Europe was rubble and Hiroshima was a scorch mark on the map....|and when~ colored people knew their place and coffee was served up by white ladies in ripple-sole shoes instead of Pakistanis in ugly 7-Eleven smocks.

Just as historical nostalgia praises reactionary values, so too does personal nostalgia dwell on regressive rather than mature values by fixating on childhood. To the extent that nostalgia is antithetical to retrieval of the truth about the personal past (the domain of psychotherapy) or the truth about the historical past (the domain of history), the question of the nature of values it depicts in positive terms requires additional investigation. Some propositions worth exploring are as follows: .ls1

P7: Nostalgia as an advertising theme is likely to attribute positive values to the era depicted.

P8: Nostalgia as an advertising theme is likely to associate positive values with benefit claims.

In conclusion, growing attention to the presence of nostalgia in advertising requires careful reassessment of two intertwined questions: first, does nostalgia succeed in stimulating desired consumer responses? And second, is activation of such responses in the best interest of consumers and of society? If the evocative power of products is as powerful in shaping popular values as those who condemn nostalgia claim, socially responsible marketers ought to take note of the kinds of values conveyed as well as of effective means of conveyance. To this end, we conclude with Proust's tribute to the "vast structure of recollection" vivified by a single crumb in a teacup (1928, pp. 65-66):

And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine ... in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the waterlilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

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