Retro brands are relaunched historical brands with updated features. The authors conduct a "netnographic" analysis of two prominent retro brands, the Volkswagen New Beetle and Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, that reveals the importance of Allegory (brand story), Aura (brand essence), Arcadia (idealized community), and Antinomy (brand paradox). Retro brand meanings are predicated on a Utopian communal element and an enlivening paradoxical essence. Retro brand management involves an uneasy, cocreative, and occasionally clamorous alliance between producers and consumers.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2016363_code1787394.pdf?abstractid=2016363&mirid=1

Teaching Old Brands New Tricks: Retro Branding and the Revival of Brand Meaning

Retro brands are relaunched historical brands with updated features. The authors conduct a “netnographic” analysis of two prominent retro brands, the Volkswagen New Beetle and Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace, that reveals the importance of Allegory (brand story), Aura (brand essence), Arcadia (idealized community), and Antinomy (brand paradox). Retro brand meanings are predicated on a utopian communal element and an enlivening paradoxical essence. Retro brand management involves an uneasy, cocreative, and occasionally clamorous alliance between producers and consumers.

/pdf/teaching-old-brands-new-tricks-retro-branding-and-the-4rm52qaewq.pdf

As studied in recent consumer research, the role of nostalgia involves both (1) a link between age and the development of consumer tastes (over time) and (2) the relationship of nostalgia proneness (a psychographic variable) to patterns of consumer preferences However, questions remain concerning whether the influence of nostalgia proneness and age can be regarded as two independent aspects of nostalgic consumption This research reports a pair of studies that investigate this issue with respect to motion picture preferences among subjects Study 1 uses an age-homogeneous sample to examine 20 items that assess nostalgia proneness, to derive a nostalgia scale, to form a spatial representation of movie preferences, and to test the fit of a vector reflecting differential nostalgia-related tastes in this preference space Study 2 generalizes these results to a sample heterogeneous with respect to age and shows that age and nostalgia proneness appear to work independently as separate aspects of nostalgic preference patterns

Nostalgia and Consumption Preferences: Some Emerging Patterns of Consumer Tastes

Evaluating a servicescape: the effect of cognition and emotion

This paper uses literary criticism as the basis for stimulus-side analysis of nostalgia in advertising text. It provides a historical context for modern nostalgia by discussing the phenomenon as a fin de siecle or “end of century” cultural effect. It presents a nostalgia taxonomy by distinguishing between two types of nostalgia — historical and personal — that determine advertising elements of plot, setting, characters, and values inherited from literary antecedents. It analyzes each type in commercial communications, using advertisements, periodicals, and direct mail catalogues as examples. Personal and historical nostalgia advertisements are linked to consumer effects of, respectively, empathy and idealization of the self. Eight propositions are developed for additional research in three areas: content analysis, different gender responses, and effects on consumer values.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/4188854

Alan R. Hirsch

Papers

Nostalgia: a Neuropsychiatric Understanding