The power of reflection: an empirical examination of nostalgia advertising effects.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that at a time when Americans are becoming increasingly uncertain and anxious about the future, many marketers and advertisers are encouraging them to "return to their pasts." Nostalgia--an individual's "longing for the past, a yearning for yesterday" (Holbrook 1993)-is a prominent theme underlying many of the marketing and advertising strategies of today (Cosgrove and Sheridan 2002; Ironson 1999; Lundegaard 2002; Poniewozik 2002; Naughton and Vlasic 1998; White 2002). Witness, for example, the popularity of oldies television channels such as TV Land and Nick at Nite; the reintroduction of the Cooper Mini automobile by BMW; the abundance of advertisements featuring characters, styles, and scenes from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; and the resurgence of 1980s television icons such as Mr. T. and ALF as product spokespeople.

With the rise of nostalgia in popular culture, marketing research attention has been garnered with a focus to define, categorize, and/or measure the construct in an effort to understand more fully how it influences consumer behavior (e.g., Baker and Kennedy 1994; Havlena and Holak 1991; Pascal, Sprott, and Muehling 2002; Rindfleisch and Sprott 2000). Among these efforts have been a small number of studies examining nostalgia's influence within an advertising context. For the most part, however, simple assumptions that have been offered in this literature--for example, that advertisements containing visual or verbal nostalgic cues are capable of evoking nostalgic thoughts in individuals, that these thoughts will be salient and positively valenced, and that the downstream effects of such ad exposures (vis-a-vis exposure to non-nostalgic ads) will yield more favorable consumer responses--have yet to be empirically validated. The current study was designed to address this empirical research void.

Specifically, this investigation examines the following research questions:

1. Are advertisements, indeed, capable of prompting "nostalgic reflections" (i.e., the generation of nostalgia-related thoughts) in consumers?

2. If so, what is the nature of these thoughts? Are they prominent (relative to other ad-evoked thoughts)? Are they most likely to be elicited early in a stream of thoughts? Are they generally positively valenced?

3. What differential advantage may accrue from the use of nostalgic ads? For example, will nostalgic ads yield more favorable evaluations of the advertisement and/or advertised brand than will ads containing no such nostalgic referents?