Marketers, there’s a right way and a wrong way to use nostalgia

FastCompany: MySpace is plotting a comeback. Searches for iPods are rising. Young people are buying point-and-shoot digital cameras, and flip phones are appearing again in people’s hands. It would be easy to dismiss all of this as another turn of the nostalgia cycle but that, in many ways, misses the point. People don’t necessarily want to return to 2006. They just don’t want to be in 2026. Nostalgia was coined in 1688 by a Swiss physician, Johannes Hofer, to describe the severe homesickness he saw in soldiers posted abroad.

The word is Greek for “the pain of wanting to return home.” What people long for has shifted from a place to a time, but the underlying impulse is similar: We miss something we feel we’ve lost. An iPod held music you chose and owned, without tracking your listening habits or deciding what you should hear next. MySpace pages were genuinely personal; people learned basic HTML just to make theirs look different, often the first code they ever wrote. Your friends were effectively your recommendation algorithm, no endless feeds, no engagement to hack. It was sloppy but free of slop.

There was a sense of autonomy and ownership that is harder to find in today’s optimized, surveilled digital spaces. That’s an important distinction for brands rushing to capitalize on nostalgia. The past can tell you something valuable about what people find lacking in the present, but simply recreating how it looked is rarely the answer. Nostalgia offers instant warmth and meaning; borrow the aesthetics of an era people already love and you inherit some of those associations. But shortcuts come with risks. Without a deeper connection to the brand, nostalgia can feel derivative.

Worse, it can create expectations the customer experience doesn’t deliver, or anchor a brand to a moment whose relevance disappears when the nostalgia cycle moves on. Don’t use nostalgia to obscure the present Nostalgia becomes a problem when brands use it to project qualities that no longer exist in the business itself. The aesthetics have to match the ethos. If you’re borrowing the visual language of an era because it feels warmer, more human, or more personal, those qualities need to exist somewhere beyond the design. Otherwise nostalgia isn’t revealing something true about the brand; it’s obscuring what has actually changed.

Burger King’s recent “Boomer King” campaign shows this tension. It draws beautifully on the visual language of the 1980s and ‘90s, but some of the warmth we associate with that period came from human interaction. Walk into many fast-food restaurants today and that has been replaced by ordering screens and increasingly automated interactions. There’s a contradiction in dehumanizing the process while using nostalgia to make the brand feel more human. Design can’t put back warmth that the business has taken out. Nostalgia works best when it gives visual expression to something that is still true.

Bring the past forward instead of going back Drawing on the past is most powerful when it starts with something authentic to the brand, rather than an era that happens to be fashionable. The Light Phone, for example, is undeniably evocative of an earlier technological era. But Light isn’t pretending smartphones never happened. It combines the tactile form and deliberate limitations of older phones with contemporary technology, including 5G and navigation. The point isn’t to recreate 2003, but to address a very current desire for technology that isn’t constantly competing for our attention.

Article truncated for readability. Read the full piece →

The article provides valuable insights on the strategic use of nostalgia in branding, which is significant for marketers, though the concept itself is not entirely new.