Why Marketers Are Going After Your Feelings

Chapter 4 of Consumer Behavior introduced us to the tactic of nostalgia-aimed marketing, or as I like to call it, "feels marketing".

The premise is that marketers understand the powers of nostalgia—those bittersweet memories of yesterdays, simpler times with a generous coating of innocence. You yearn for it. You long for it. And marketers know it.

What marketers look like walking into the office with a nostalgia campaign in mind.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

The goldmine of marketing materials lies within the confine of your mind. Your memories and experiences have constructed a library of emotions from which we retrieve certain feelings or thoughts. Your exposure to something and your reaction to it is what the marketer is after, with hopes that if you expressed a positive emotion—happiness, arousal, excitement, etc.—your mind  will trigger a similar reaction to what you're being exposed to by said marketer. 

Cue The Feelings

Morrissey would be particularly susceptible to nostalgia marketing.

What they're after are your retrieval cues: those images and objects that evoke the longing that will, with any luck, drive you to purchase their product or partake in their offering. 

Some brands will opt to target certain time eras, be it the 70s or 80s or what have you. There is, of course, a direct correlation between target audiences and their demographics. If you're after baby-boomers, then those time periods might be most effective. You simply need to have that connection. There's a careful art to marketing to different generations.

It Comes Down To Culture

For example:

Millenials are heavy on brand loyalty, but are more likely to try something new. They have a shorter attention span, enjoy immediate gratification, and can detect scams a mile away. They're the Robocop's of consumption. 

Baby-boomers on the other hand, love older brands. The classics they grew up with. Loyalty turned into routine for them over the years. Their understanding of brands goes back to the birth of marketing, so traditional strategies may be more appropriate. 

If you don't understand the the life and times of this audience, you're going to run into quite a few walls with a retro-campaign. This means understanding the language, sounds, visuals, and the technology of their respective times.

But Sometimes Your Efforts Transcend Space and Time

There are cultural classics—the brands and movements that simply do not expire. I am talking about the Star Wars', the Leonardo DeCaprios, the Michael Jacksons. The brands that do not expire. They do not know the meaning of "the end", and can be both nostalgic and modern at the same time. 

This means that they can evoke those cues across time and space. Literally. 

And some modern brands are able to do just that.

Do you know why Stranger Things was so incredibly effective? Because they were able to appeal to multiple audiences by tapping into the visual elements that timeless pop culture is made of. The stuff that my mom remembers and passed down to me. We both have different memories, but they evoke the same emotions.The elements that your cues are made of.

Sometimes the most simple nods to a time and place can have a generation-spanning effect. And that is exactly what you, the marketer, is after.