Nostalgia isn’t just personal—it’s social. Memories are such a large part of how we connect with past experiences, people, places and emotions that shaped who we are today. National Geographic reported that human brains are even “hardwired to crave it [nostalgia].”
“While experiencing nostalgia, people feel a sense of warmness, fondness and belonging, and even experience a sort of mental time travel, all of which can drive people to seek out nostalgia,” according to Ziyan Yang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Psychology, as reported by National Geographic.
It must be why the Barbie movie smashed box office records when it landed in theaters in July 2023—or why for the latest football season, the New York Jets brought back its “Classic” throwback uniform the team wore during the 1968 championship season.
Event marketers should take note—and take advantage of this boom in nostalgia. It’s happening, according to many researchers, because of troubled emotions that started with the pandemic, per National Geographic, and perhaps persisted through the recent election. Nostalgic moments, meanwhile, “take people back to a better, less serious time,” Derek Berry, the president of experiences at Los Angeles-based “things-to-do app” Bucket Listers, told Vendelux.
“There is a lot of noise in the market, and new things are always popping up—some of them great and some of them not,” Berry said. But “with nostalgia, there is more trust with what the consumer is going to get,” he added.
David Ogiste of global creative brand experience agency Nobody’s Café highlighted in a LinkedIn post that Pleasing, Harry Styles’ unisex nail care, beauty and lifestyle brand, held a pop-up back in June that transported guests into a 1950s ice cream parlor—bright checkerboard floors, neon signs and all.
“But why the 1950s? Many of Harry Styles’ fans weren’t around then—some haven’t even seen Grease!” Ogiste wrote in the post. It’s because people can still be nostalgic for a time that they either didn’t live through or weren’t old enough to remember. It’s called “vicarious nostalgia,” per Ogiste’s post.
However nostalgic an experience, it’s still important to breathe new life into old things, Barry said, noting that even utilizing social media or recreating a set and bringing an element of virtual reality technology into an experience is a way to modernize a nostalgic moment.
Pleasing, for example, tapped influencers to create content while attending the ice cream parlor, generating buzz and a sense of FOMO—which requires a whole other set of skills covered in an earlier Vendelux story.
