When brands spend millions every year to transport Super Bowl audiences back in time during commercials, what happens if they choose the wrong era? Knowing who prefers what part of history is valuable marketing knowledge, and a new tool developed at the University of Arizona offers a way to measure which era evokes the most nostalgia.
Caleb Warren, professor and Robert A. Eckert Endowed Chair in Marketing at the Eller College of Management , created the Nostalgia for Eras scale over a series of studies he conducted alongside Matthew Farmer, a former Ph.D. student at the U of A and now assistant professor of marketing at Utah Valley University. Their work was published in the Journal of Advertising.
Warren and Farmer wanted to help marketers and brand managers know they're making the right decisions when banking on nostalgia. Previous efforts to measure the feeling focused on specific events or the past as a general concept, but Warren said people actually feel nostalgic for periods of time – either personal eras like teen years or collective experiences like the 1950s.
By understanding those preferences, brands can better predict consumer habits.
"If you want to evoke nostalgia, you need to figure out which era of the past your consumers feel the most loss toward, the most idealistic about, and have the warmest feelings toward," Warren said. "Just choosing the time when your target audience was in their 20s or late teens won't work for a lot of people, especially as products and brands become more segmented based on values and ideologies rather than just age."
The researchers reviewed consumer essays, previous research, news coverage and more than 200 advertisements, and through that work defined nostalgia as composed of three parts: warmth felt remembering the past, loss that time has moved on, and the idealization that life was less complicated and more carefree back then.
After identifying the key components of nostalgia, the research team assessed how much an era makes someone reminisce by asking hundreds of people to identify for which decade they felt most nostalgic. Fewer than half chose their formative years.
"While we may in a lot of ways be at our peak in our early 20s, some people may have traveled or lived abroad or had some other extraordinary experience in their 30s, 40s, or maybe even 80s." Warren said. "What our model can predict is that someone may be more nostalgic for that time than their earlier years. If a group of people see the 1950s, the 1980s or even the Old West as the 'Golden Age,' then those are the eras you should portray in your advertisements to make them feel the most nostalgic."
Warren and Farmer then verified their work by showing people who indicated a preference for the 1990s both contemporary and period specific advertising for eBay, and recorded those people feeling more positively towards the brand after the older ad. When the experiment was repeated with people who preferred other decades, the '90s marketing material had no effect.
The scale also predicted which film trailers different audiences would choose to watch based on their nostalgic preferences, which Warren said is a perfect example of the tool's applicability to market research.
Instead of hoping for the best, brands can replace intuition with understanding.
"If you're a producer who wants to create a period piece for a specific audience like a global market or Baby Boomers, you should get a sense of which times they are most nostalgic for," Warren said. "By using our scale, you can better understand which particular era your content should portray."
