UA's nostalgia scale helps marketers measure which eras evoke the strongest feelings

Nostalgia can be a powerful force — be it in advertising or in the TV shows and movies we choose to watch. But how well do marketers know who is nostalgic for which time period — or personal time period, like a childhood or college years?

A new scale aims to help figure that out. It’s called the Nostalgia for Eras scale, and details on it were published recently in the Journal of Advertising.

Caleb Warren is a Marketing Professor in the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona and one of the researchers on this, and he joined The Show to talk more about it.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Caleb, can you first off describe what the Nostalgia for Eras Scale actually is?

CALEB WARREN: Sure. So, just to give a little background, there’s been a fair amount of research on nostalgia, which is a sort of sentimental longing for the past. But it’s treated the past as this one monolithic thing.

And what Matt, my co-author, and I thought was missing was this idea that when people are nostalgic, most of the time they’re not just nostalgic for any time in the past. They’re nostalgic for very particular times. And we wanted to know, well, you know, what times in the past are people nostalgic for, and why are they nostalgic for those times?

And there wasn’t an instrument to measure this because generally the research, like the scales that existed, were all about, you know, “How much do you miss the good old days?” or maybe it’s more specific, like childhood. But there wasn’t a scale that could measure, like, how nostalgic are you for the 1990s or the 1960s or the Old West or the 2000s.

So that’s what — that’s what we set out to do was try to both come up with a way of — a different way of thinking about nostalgia and also measuring nostalgia where we could measure it for different discrete time periods, which we call eras.

MARK BRODIE: So how exactly does it work? Like, do you try to take a particular brand or a particular product or a particular demographic of people and try to figure out which era will make them feel the most nostalgic?

CALEB WARREN: The scale itself is straightforward. So you can issue it to any sample or population, and you plug in whatever era you’re interested in. So you can say the 1990s, you can say the 1960s, you can say the Old West, you can say personal eras: your childhood, your 20s. And then it asks a bunch of questions about this time — about this era.

So some of the items measure how their feeling — warm feelings towards the era. So “I associate this time with mostly positive things.” A second set of measures is about how much loss they feel: “I’m sad things are no longer like they were then.” A third set of items is about the view that this time was sort of simple or ideal or pure: “There was less chaos back then.”

And then you can basically add up the scores for all of these items, and they’ll give you a validated measure of how nostalgic the population who’s answering this was for that particular time. And so if you wanted to compare different eras, you take the same measures and ask them once about the 1990s and once about the 2000s or the 1950s or whatever other time period you were interested in.

MARK BRODIE: So if I’m a company that’s looking to use nostalgia in a commercial or marketing campaign, how would I go about using this to try to reach as many people as I could who maybe don’t feel nostalgic for the same time?

CALEB WARREN: So if your customers are not nostalgic or are all nostalgic for different times, then it’s going to be hard to evoke nostalgia or appeal to them with a nostalgic ad because even if you’re trying to evoke nostalgia in one of your advertisements, you usually need to do that by evoking a certain time.

Occasionally there are ads that try to show sort of the past across eras, but mostly nostalgic ads are showing one particular time in the past. Where this scale would be more useful is if companies are not sure which time in the past their consumers are most nostalgic for. And then they could use the scale to figure out, “Oh, OK, our target customers are more nostalgic for the 2000s,” or “They’re more nostalgic for the 1960s.” And then they could use that to create an ad that’s set in the 1960s versus 2000s.

Or if they’re in the sort of the content business or they’re producing movies or documentaries or TV shows — Netflix wants to know, “Should we greenlight a show set in the ’60s, or, you know, another ‘Wonder Years,’ or a show set in the ’80s, like another ‘Stranger Things’?”

MARK BRODIE: What is it about thinking about the past or seeing ads or TV shows or movies about the past that is so appealing to us as consumers?

CALEB WARREN: This is one of these questions that I think the existing answer that’s talked about doesn’t totally satisfy me. So the standard answer, if you look at the research, is, well, people enjoy nostalgia because it helps them feel more connected to themselves and to others, especially when they’re feeling that connection is lacking.

And I think that’s true, but I’m not really sure why, taking a step back, why people experience nostalgia generally. Is there an adaptive benefit of it? Is this sort of an offshoot of some other psychological process that happens? Because I don’t see a whole lot of benefit for reminiscing or, you know, wanting to transport yourself back to this time that not only doesn’t exist anymore, but one of the reasons it’s appealing is that it does seem very different than time today.

So it’s sort of a curious phenomenon, I think, and I’m not sure we have a really good understanding for why people regularly experience nostalgia or why they tend to enjoy it. Now, there’s definitely some mixed feelings there. Nostalgia is not a purely positive emotion. There’s happiness also mixed with loss and longing.

MARK BRODIE: So how would you like to see this scale used now that you’ve developed it and put it out there?

CALEB WARREN: That’s a good question. What I’d like to see used even more than the scale is the idea that people are nostalgic for particular times in the past, certain eras, rather than the past in general. And also, it might not just be the time when they were 20 years old.

It’s going to depend on how they think about that time period. And that is very much shaped by the media and the stories that they tell their friends and their family, and the photos they have, and the movies they’ve seen representing that time, and the advertisements they’ve seen representing that time.

And because of that, people could be nostalgic for times they never lived through. Like, the Old West is a recurring one in the United States, anyway, where there is a subsection of the population who I would say are nostalgic for the Old West, and that’s part of the appeal of Western movies and TV shows and, like, Wells Fargo ads, where, for a section of the population, the values represented during that time — like independence, freedom, you could make your own way, you could live separate from bureaucracy and organizations and you had space — that’s going to lead to nostalgia because of these sort of shared values that those times represent.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Caleb Warren, a professor of marketing at the University of Arizona Eller College of Management. Caleb, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

CALEB WARREN: Thank you.