The effect of nostalgia:An investigation on nostalgic advertising in the B2B sector

Abstract

Ever since the 1990s, nostalgia marketing, more specifically nostalgic advertising, started to gain attention from researchers. Nostalgia is a powerful tool, which generates strong emotions from target audiences and has an impact on the overall advertising message, brand or product as well as the service. Literature and research conducted in the field of nostalgia focused exclusively on consumer markets (B2C). Yet, literature and research on nostalgia in business-to-business (B2B) markets remains very scarce and is almost nonexistent. The purpose of this study is to dive deeper into the field of nostalgia marketing and nostalgic advertising in the B2B sector in order to demonstrate potential effects of nostalgic advertising in B2B. The literature review serves as a bridge from emotions and experiences in marketing, both of which contribute to nostalgia marketing, thereby underscoring their importance in the context of nostalgia marketing and advertising. Initially, fundamental definitions of key topics of this thesis were given to provide readers with a common understanding. A custom designed framework was used to conduct a comparison of real-life nostalgic advertisements (ads) in B2B and B2C with the aim of investigating the prevalence of nostalgia in ads especially in B2B and to showcase similarities and differences of nostalgic-themed ads. This has shown that the use of nostalgic elements in B2B advertising is very scarce as only a limited number of real-life nostalgic ads in the B2B industry have been found. Besides that, a content analysis was carried out giving insights into the subject matter of nostalgia marketing. The content analysis has been performed following a custom designed framework, which showed the potential of nostalgia marketing and advertising for B2B brands. Real-life success factors of nostalgic ads in B2B and B2C as well as possible success factors, which nostalgia marketing brings with, were identified. The results are limited due to the lack of available and reliable literature on nostalgia. The sample size in both research parts focused on a limited number of units, which include advertisements as well as blog posts and articles. This thesis confirms that the literature on nostalgia in B2B remains unexplored including the comparison and content analysis, which demonstrated the limited number of real-life examples and literature on nostalgia in B2B settings. Nonetheless, findings indicated that there is a potential for the use of nostalgia marketing and advertising in B2B. Both research methods showed a generally positive outcome on nostalgia in marketing and advertising with predominantly positive reactions on nostalgic ads from the audiences.

Datum der Bewilligung	2024
Originalsprache	Englisch
Betreuer/-in	Peter Hutterer (Betreuer*in)