Throwback Thursday: The Power of Nostalgia Marketing
RadioEd co-host Emma Atkinson chats with associate professor of marketing Ana Babic Rosario about her work on nostalgia marketing.
Hosted by Jordyn Reiland and Emma Atkinson, RadioEd is a triweekly podcast created by the DU Newsroom that taps into the University of Denver’s deep pool of bright brains to explore the most exciting new research out of DU. See below for a transcript of this episode.
Show Notes
Our lives are made up of the experiences we’ve had. And those experiences stick with us, particularly the good ones.
When we look back on our lives, it’s easy to feel as though things were better in the past. We long for the “good ‘ol days,” as it were.
There’s a word for this feeling: Nostalgia.
And nostalgia, like many other human emotions, has been commodified. That’s right: Advertisers, marketers and even politicians know people yearn for bygone times, and they know just how to take advantage of it.
Ana Babic Rosario, professor of marketing at the University of Denver, studies what’s called “nostalgia marketing." She says that nostalgia is complex; it’s about more than just longing for the past.
On this episode of RadioEd, Emma chats with Rosario about the good, the bad and the ugly of nostalgia marketing—and finds out who’s most susceptible to it.
We're even seeing it in this year's presidential election campaigns, with Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan and '80s throwback merch from Kamala Harris:
And the Denver Broncos recently threw it back to the 1970s with vintage-style jerseys:
More Information:
Ana Babic Rosario's research webpage
"The Anatomy of Nostalgic Package Design"
"Marketing and Nostalgia: Unpacking the Past and Future of Marketing and Consumer Research on Nostalgia" by Ana Babic Rosario et. al
