How nostalgia in advertising increases brand love: a cross-country study
| Date | 30 July 2024 |
| Pages | 869-887 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-12-2023-4857 |
| Published date | 30 July 2024 |
| Author | Silvia Grappi,Veronique Pauwels-Delassus,Giuseppe Pedeliento,Lia Zarantonello |
How nostalgia in advertising increases brand
love: a cross-country study
Silvia Grappi
Department of Communication and Economics, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Reggio Emilia, Italy
Veronique Pauwels-Delassus
Department of Marketing and Sales Management, IESEG School of Management, University of Lille, CNRS (UMR 9221),
LEM-Lille Economie Management, Lille, France
Giuseppe Pedeliento
Department of Management, Universita degli Studi di Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy, and
Lia Zarantonello
Faculty of Business and Law, University of Roehampton, London, UK
Abstract
Purpose –This paper aims to investigate the extent to which nostalgic advertising can foster brand love. Itexamines the effects of two common
forms of nostalgia in advertising –that is, personal and historical nostalgia –on consumers’love towards a brand in both a developed (the UK) and
a developing country (India).
Design/methodology/approach –A pre-test and post-test quasi-experimental study was conducted with two representative samples of consumers
(i.e. 277 British and 255 Indian). Respondents were randomly exposed to one ad evoking either personal or historical nosta lgia, or a non-nostalgic ad.
Findings –The results indicate that the use of nostalgia in advertising increases brand love in both countries. However, the effectiveness of each
type of nostalgia varies depending on the country considered. In the UK, personal nostalgia increases brand love more than historical nostalgia,
whereas, in India, historical nostalgia was found to be more significantly related to brand love than personal nos talgia.
Practical implications –The primary implication for marketers is to consider nostalgic advertising as a critical lever to building longer-term value
for a brand (i.e. brand love) whilst being mindful of the country-specific differences regarding how such a lever should be executed to achieve
effectiveness be effective.
Originality/value –The paper contributes to the advancement of the brand love literature by clarifying whether, and under what circumstances, the
use of specific types of nostalgia in advertising increases consumers’love towards a brand.
Keywords Brand nostalgia, Nostalgic advertising, Personal nostalgia, Historical nostalgia, Brand love, Developed countries, Developing countries
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Contemporary overcrowded markets require companies to
develop meaningful brands that are capableofelicitingpositive
emotions (Mingione et al., 2020;Tellis et al., 2019). Despite
the array of consumers’positiveemotions towards brands being
wide and featuring different levels of intensity (Palusuk et al.,
2019), recent research has primarily been focused on
identifying what drives consumers to experience the highest
form of positive emotion towards a brand (i.e.brand love) and
unveiling which outcomes loved brands enjoy compared to
others that are less likely to generate such extremely positive
emotions (see, e.g. Albert and Merunka, 2013;Bairrada et al.,
2018;Batra et al., 2012;Bergkvist and Bech-Larsen, 2010;
Bıçakcıo
glu et al., 2018;Carroll and Ahuvia, 2006;Granot
et al., 2013;Huber et al.,2015;Roy et al.,2013;Vernuccio
et al.,2015).
Research has found that brand lovecan be fostered in many
ways, including communication via social media (Arya et al.,
2022;Song and Kim, 2022), product design (Hemonnet-
Goujot and Valette-Florence, 2022), the creation and
nurturing of brand communities (Palazon et al., 2018;Paruthi
et al., 2023), advertisinginvestments (Nguyen and Feng, 2021)
and through marketing actions aimed at increasing consumer-
brand identification(Bergkvist and Bech-Larsen, 2010).
However, despite the literatureoffering a nearly endless list
of propulsors of brand love, research focusing on the role of
advertising in creating brand love remains in short supply
(Nguyen and Feng, 2021). In particular, a thorough
investigationat the extant literature on the relationship between
brand love and advertising reveals a dearth of studies focusing
The current issue and full text archiveof this journal is available on Emerald
Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/1061-0421.htm
Journal of Product & Brand Management
33/7 (2024) 869–887
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 1061-0421]
[DOI 10.1108/JPBM-12-2023-4857]
Author contributions: Authors have contributed equally to the paper and are
listed in alphabetical order.
Received 6 December 2023
Revised 16 April 2024
24 June 2024
Accepted 24 June 2024
869
on whether nostalgic advertising–a form of advertising created
to provide consumers with a connection to the past
(Holbrook and Schindler, 1991;Stern, 1992)–fosters or
hinders consumers’lovefor brands.
Bridging this gap is of great importance for both theoretical
and empirical reasons. Scholars have often shown that brand
love has deep personal/autobiographical roots, implying that
people tend to fall in love with brands that resonate with their
past (Albert et al.,2009;Bagozzi et al.,2017;Batra et al., 2012;
Langner et al., 2016;Zarantonelloet al.,2016). A closer look at
the role that nostalgic advertising plays in generating and
reinforcing consumers’feelingsof brand love allows for a better
understanding of the psychologicalmechanisms through which
brand love is formed,as well as the various levers that marketers
can deploy to facilitate the formationof this positive brand-
linked emotion.
Made popular in the 1990s, nostalgicadvertising has recently
made a significant comeback (Barnwell et al., 2022;Diaz,
2021;Hartmann and Brunk, 2019;Srivastava et al.,2023).
This comeback may be related to the fact that people tend to
seek comfort in nostalgia, especially when they experience
negative events, as nostalgia makes people feel hopeful and
more optimistic about the future (Stern, 1992). The recent
global pandemic has arguably triggered an increase in
emotionally charged cues in advertising, including nostalgia
(Mangiò et al., 2021,2024). In recent years, the return of
nostalgia in brand communicationhas been so widespread that
Advertising Week (2021) underscored nostalgia in advertising
as a trend to watch. Moreover, Vanity Fair commented on the
commercials broadcasted during the 2022 Super Bowl as “a
feast of millennial nostalgia”(Murphy, 2022). Kantar (2023)
identified nostalgia as one of the key trends witnessed across
many of 2023’s Kantar Creative Effectiveness Award winners,
including TV winner, KFC Heritage.
Many brands now utilise nostalgia in their advertising
strategies and tactics, including popular global icons such as
Disney, Gucci, Netflix, Coca-Cola, Nintendo,Vans and many
others. In the UK, for instance, Frankie & Benny’s launched
the “Bring It Back”campaignin April 2023 to advertise a menu
with dishes and prices from 2003. Kellogg’s introduced a twist
on its classic “Crunchy Nut Flakes”in December 2022, and
Weetabix’s Weetos added a caramel flavour to its range due to
its association with indulgence and nostalgia. Furthermore,
Nestl
e celebrated the 70th anniversary of “Shreddies”,
continued their partnership with Nick Knowles and
encouraged consumers to share their favourite memories of
Shreddies using the hashtag#Shreddies70 (Mintel, 2023).
The growing importance garnered by nostalgia (Cattaneo
and Guerini, 2012;Vredeveld and Kara, 2022) has resulted in
an increasing body of research examining theeffects of
nostalgic advertising on brand outcomes (e.g. Banerjee and
Shaikh, 2022;Gilal et al., 2020;Hallegatte et al.,2018;
Vredeveld and Kara, 2022). A recent meta-analysis on
nostalgic advertising has shown that nostalgic messages are
more persuasive than non-nostalgic messages, resulting in
consumers’stronger brand preferences and higher rates of
brand attitude (Cheng and Yan, 2023). However, empirical
evidence of this form of advertising indeed being useful for
creating brandlove remains lacking.
In addition, although nostalgiais a pancultural emotion with
causes and consequences that may vary across different
countries (Hepper et al.,2014), nostalgic advertising has
primarily been investigated within developed countries, whilst
studies comparing the effectiveness of nostalgic advertising
across countries at differentlevels of development are relatively
rare (Ford et al.,2018;Jainet al.,2019;Merchant et al., 2016).
Therefore, the aim of this research is twofold. The first aim is
to determine whether brand love can be increased through
nostalgic advertising, whilst the second is to verify how the
relationship between nostalgic advertising and brand love is
invariant across developed and developing countries. To this
end, a pre-test-post-test quasi-experimental study with an
untreated control group was conductedwith British and Indian
adult consumers.
This paper aims to answer the followingresearch questions:
RQ1.Does nostalgic advertising increase brandlove? How is
the relationship between nostalgic advertising and
brand love different across developed and developing
countries?
The contribution of this research to the branding and
advertising literature is twofold. Firstly, it offers an initial
empirical analysis connecting brand love with nostalgic
advertising. Secondly, it provides insights into how brand love
can be increased by nostalgic advertising across countries at
different levelsofdevelopment.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. It first
reports the conceptual background of the study and the
hypotheses developed. Then, it reports the methodology
adopted and presents the data analysis process and results. It
then reflects on the theoretical and managerial implications
derived from the study, its limitations and future research
directions.
2.Conceptual background and hypothesis
development
2.1On the meaning of brand love
The concept of brand love was introduced more than 30years
ago (Shimp and Madden, 1988). Drawing on psychological
theories of interpersonal love (Sternberg, 1986), early scholars
stretched the love concept to branding, suggesting that brand
love is a combination of passion, intimacy and commitment
(Ahuvia, 2015;Shimp and Madden, 1988). Since then,
researchers have developed a wide array of conceptualisations
of brand love by focusing on the specificities of consumer-
brand relationships (Palusuk et al., 2019;Zarantonello and
Pauwels-Delassus, 2015). Although some proposed a view of
brand love as a unidimensional construct (e.g. Carroll and
Ahuvia, 2006), others rapidly realised that brand love is better
conceptualised and operationalised if it is intended as a
multifaceted,multi-dimensional construct. For example,brand
love has been conceptualised as a construct underlying the
dimensions of affection, expressed as uniqueness, intimacy,
duration, memories, dreams and passion, comprising pleasure
and idealisation (Albert et al.,2009). An alternative
conceptualisation views brand love as being composed of
several dimensions, including self-brand integration, passion-
driven behaviours, positive emotional connection, long-term
Nostalgia in advertising
Silvia Grappi et al.
Journal of Product & Brand Management
Volume 33 · Number 7 · 2024 · 869–887
870
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