May We Think of the Past Fondly

A method of advertising we recently discussed in our advertising class was the usage of nostalgia. Nostalgia is when the past is shown to remind us of great success and happy memories we associate with a certain brand or product. It is a very effective method since you generally will always have something positive to run with from the past. It is also great that the things associated with the nostalgia in an advertisement does not even have to be from that brand or product's history. For example in Samsung's recent commercial for their new watch...

 

None of those watches even exist, nor are they even slightly associated with Samsung. Yet does it not work effectively? It makes us think about how we used to dream and think about the cool futuristic technology we might possess some day when we were kids. Because of this reminiscing of amazing fictional technology, we associate all those positive things with this new Samsung watch that is shown at the end. So we ultimately think that this watch surpasses and can do even more then these other watches.

A big problem though with this is what if someone has no idea what any of these past fictional watches are? Now they will still recognize the fact that those other watches are really futuristic and cool, but they will completely miss where they come from and how amazingly awesome they were from those movies. Nostalgia advertisements rely on the premise that the person watching it and engaging with the advertisement has to have seen whatever nostalgic references are being shown, otherwise it is completely lost upon the viewer. After all you can't exactly reminisce about something that you've never seen or experienced.

The usage of nostalgia as a strategy for advertising is not always the best choice. Like stated before it can exclude certain people since they may have never seen or experienced whatever it is the advertisement is bringing up. Another issue is the fact that it may bring up negative memories rather then positive ones. Now for the most part I think that nostalgia brings up positivity, but it is possible to pull up negativity instead. For example with Microsoft's new commercial...

 

I personally do not remember the products and trendy things people did from the 90's very fondly. I imagine a good amount of others also do not remember the 90's all that positively. All those products and things that people did in the 90's all seem quite ridiculous and stupid to me, thus I associate that with Microsoft's new Internet Explorer. Nostalgia can be used for most brands and products I think, but for it to be effective it must bring up positive memories and must try not to exclude too many people by showing things that only certain generations would know of.