One of the main trends for 2021, nostalgia marketing has been applied for some time and you may not even have realized it. In this article I will explain how it works and how it can be a good strategy for your actions in search of customers and sales.
For example, I highlight a personal experience: I was browsing Netflix and realized that a series called Cobra KaiIt was that week, the number one trend program in the popular streaming service. Superficially, this seems like a very unlikely scenario.
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Cobra Kai is the sequel to the 1984 film Karate Kid and follows the story of teenage stars in an intensely repeated story in the afternoon sessions on TV. The original film attracted children (and started a karate revolution), but this series with sexual references, drug use and violence is more adult-oriented.
The series (forgive me fans) is not that exciting, but it has a '80s vibe in its music and aesthetics. It's very predictable and I haven't really finished watching the first episodes.
How in the world did this series get on top of the preference, among thousands of highly quoted Netflix options?
Next I will try to explain why and predict that this is just the beginning of a growing trend based on nostalgia. And nostalgia sells and attracts consumers
Is that some kind of efficient marketing?
First, let's get on the same page about what I mean by nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a sentimental yearning for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. An example of a company that uses nostalgia to evoke these positive emotions would be to launch a “retro” edition of a product that evokes childhood memories.
With a look at this movement, Pepsi reintroduced last year into some world markets limited-edition retro cans. The images of the cans, dating from the 1940s to the 1980s, were part of Pepsi’s “Celebringing Every Generation” campaign.
Recognizing something from your childhood can arouse good memories of what Pepsi meant to you and possibly stimulate a purchase to recapture that feeling.
Nostalgia marketing is the advertising equivalent of a large smoking mug of your favorite soup on a cold day. At a time when everything has to be faster, better, bigger, more and more, the marketing of longing brings us back to a simpler time when simple pleasures made everything all right.
By persuading consumers that their concerns about the now can dissipate at a time, companies can deliver their marketing message to a more receptive customer and convey the feeling that will last much longer than the current moment.
The key to nostalgic marketing is to understand what motivates your audience, to think about how they were created and where their deepest emotional receptors actually reside.
A little research is very useful and, by analyzing your customers' generational division, you can learn much more easily what can make each one of them work.
For marketing, nostalgia creates an emotional bond of the brand with its consumers, so it becomes so powerful.
Data from Marketing Week magazine show that marketing nostalgia can even be attributed to science. Although there is no Golden Age, the nineties are now the most lovingly remembered decade, followed closely by the eighties, seventy - sixties.
Although the 1950s and 1990s have caused less positivity, it will be interesting to see change over time as new generations become more mature consumers.
How to do marketing nostalgia
- Think of your strategy as a well-structured project involving multiple channels and if it is the case that your business or business has a strong connection with the retro world, bet on branding actions to further strengthen the brand.
- Pay attention to the subtlest details, those nuances that will really touch your customers. That could be anything from a back screen to a redesigned product.
- Do research and find out what your audience feels like something special. See the dates of the story or even your timeline.
- Go to your files and rescue those old pictures and clips of movie, gold powder marketing!
- Maybe you'll see how your brand evolved over the years. It's a fun project to do for business. Here at NVX we're taking this very seriously.
- Creating funny content and creating a connection with the reader reliving things from the past is an alternative.
- You can do this through blog posts, quizzes and even videos.
The important thing is that you relate the nostalgia of your persona to the kind of content you offer.
Instead of promoting a product or service, marketing through nostalgia encourages communities to remember why they love their brand. Even if customers are not in a position to buy now, this reinforces the brand's reputation and keeps you on the radar.
Marketing Nostalgia in the networks
If it is well done and planned, as I have mentioned before, this marketing tactic creates incredible engagement.
Try to recreate images with backgrounds and fonts using old movie posters or series, but with your company name in place.
In your content agenda, try to include the #tbt hashtag (throwback thuersday) very popular and used to mark old reposted contents.
Posts that have performed well in the past (use metrics to check) are also alternatives to engage even more.
Retrieving and recreating classics from the past in marketing language works very well. One of the most watched series on Netflix “Stranger Things” Drink from this fountain. Videos, images, gifs and montages of the series were part of the content explored by the company to disseminate and the success was immense. The soundtrack, filled with '80s hits, then, is not even spoken.
Check out the video they made with Xuxa to release Stranger Things! Pure nostalgia!
What to do and what not to do:
The connection with your audience must be impacted by creative actions, but do nothing illegal. Beware of copyright when using known trademarks and cases. Social networks have algorithms that identify unauthorized usage violations and block their content.
First, let's do what we do.
Persona at the top – Consider the age of your persona. It is important to know that at each stage of life nostalgic moments are different. So, you should evaluate the age of your persona to find out what memories to resurrect when you're planning your campaign.
Good Sources – Here your credibility will be at stake. Search for and use reliable sources to transmit true and proven content.
If you're gonna write a post about the best toys of the '70s, it doesn't make sense to put someone born in the '90s to write, does it?
Your post will become much more real if you use fonts that have gone through what you want to post.
Special Dates – A strategy widely used in networking posts, can gain deeper meaning here and gain nostalgic content. Children's Day, Easter, Christmas, New Year's Eve, birthdays of famous brands or iconic celebrities help in the interest.
And what not to do:
Avoid throwing a ball – Try not to arouse bad feelings with nostalgia. Align your ideals with intelligent actions and bring value to your persona.
Don't push it – Even if it's a marketing trend, try not to shove a nostalgia campaign down your audience's throat. Run tests to see if the message is being received. Keep insisting on something with no return, it doesn't make any sense.
Create, but don’t copy – Keep repeating what others do, the famous “copier the mate” doesn’t take well in nostalgia marketing that has a focus of originality. Create your own content so you don't fall into the copycat.
Conclusion
A good brand needs to create emotional connection between your products/services and your audience.
We are entering a period of “boom” for products loaded with emotion such as retro clothes, toys and games of the past, comforting foods associated with childhood, a rebirth in music, TV and movies of the 1980s and 1990s.
I also believe we will see family images, sources and design trends from the last decades returning to a generation that seeks the comfort of a happier time.
And that explains why a rather stupid program like Cobra Kai was at the top of Netflix charts. We want to forget all that stuff that's in there and root for the Karate Kid one more time.
