Hendrick’s gin looks like it has been plucked out of the Victorian era. But the brand was launched in 1999. All this is a twist on “nostalgia marketing”, a common term in contemporary advertising signifying a brand using its history to excite the imagination of consumers.

According to a recent study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, feeling nostalgic “weakens a person’s desire for money” – or, to be more direct, encourages them to buy lots of stuff. But what if your brand has no actual history? That’s when you reach for “newstalgia”: using fragments of historical flotsam to spark warm feelings for a novel product.

There are two reasons for this backwards drift. The first, as a recent article in the International Journal of Research in Marketing suggests, is a search for “enchantment” by consumers looking to bring some “wonder, romance and magic” to their lives. The second is one of capitalism’s endless dilemmas, as Walter Benjamin intuited it: how can goods that have been mechanically reproduced feel authentic.

Full article here: http://bit.ly/35OMg1B