From Paper Boat to Google, how brands bank on nostalgia
While 2016's ads may have leaned more towards celebrities, drawing from the good old days is still a staple trick
Debating whether or not to send his parents away to an old-age home, a young man gets under the shower and returns with clarity of thought. As improbable as it may sound, this is advertising, selling a water heater on the back of nostalgia.
Racold Thermo Ltd’s latest advertising campaign, titled “Power of a Hot Shower", conceptualized by BBDO and produced by Cutawayy Films, uses a theme—nostalgia—that is a perpetual favourite in the ad world, and it’s not surprising why.
Memories are triggered by sights, sounds and images (and in some cases touch and smell). They invoke both anticipation and remembrance. Advertising combines all of these facets in a time capsule called nostalgia which creative experts describe as both “comfort food" and “emotional blackmail" to communicate a brand’s directive.
While 2016 (in terms of advertising) was celebrity obsessed more than nostalgic, younger brands like Google and Paper Boat, among others, used the theme effectively in their advertising campaigns to take viewers back to simpler times and perhaps a place of familiarity.
In June, Google created a six-minute ad titled “The Hero—A Bollywood Story". It touched upon how Hindi films have stirred and doused hopes of countless thousands, and they did this with an unlikely protagonist—the 60-something father of a young aspiring actor.
The idea was to show how the previous generation had to give up on their dreams because they did not have access to technology—in this case, Google.
“Getting to the core of how our users think, feel and act is an everyday task as we make products," writes Sapna Chadha, country head of marketing, Google India, in an emailed response. “We take the same approach to marketing. People are rooted in their memories and emotions and we only are building our work on that premise."
Created by advertising agency Lowe Lintas, it opens with a dinner-table conversation between a mother (Gujarati actor Morali Desai) and son (actor Vicky Kaushal, famous for his role in Masaan). The son, who has a job in Mumbai, asks his parents to join him there, since his father (Marathi theatre actor Nandu Madhav) has retired from his job in the hill town they live in.
The mother tells him that his father would never agree to shift to Mumbai, a city he went to 40 years ago to become an actor. He had even landed a role in a film that was to be shot near Bengaluru, but his Bollywood dream was shattered by his own father (the young man’s grandfather) who brought him back to their home town to become a manager in a cinema hall.
Here the film uses what ad veteran K.V. Sridhar, founder and chief creative officer of Hyper Collective, describes as “borrowed nostalgia".
“Newer and younger brands like Google and Paper Boat, which have not been around for hundreds of years, borrow from the characters in these ads. Google, which is talking to young people, uses older protagonists to tell the story to the young audiences," explains Sridhar.
In Paper Boat’s “Rizwan: Keeper of the Gates of Heaven", an ad film that released in May 2016, Rizwan is an old blind man who lives alone in a secluded home in the hills and is reliving unadulterated memories of his childhood.
Neeraj Kakkar, founder and chief executive of Hector Beverages Pvt. Ltd, the company that runs Paper Boat, has the daunting task of competing with the memories of the drinks he creates, and so they are a recurring theme in the brand’s communication.
How powerful is nostalgia?
Psychologically, nostalgia taps into the human mind and consciousness, by evoking fond memories. Entire generations of audiences can be virtually transported to a seemingly simpler, happier time, such that they as a group identify with the content on display.
Nostalgia has both emotional and cognitive elements. It also taps into the “need to belong", says Chadha of Google.
According to Hyper Collective’s Sridhar, the power of nostalgia lies in the fact that it can bring back lost love for brands both old and new. “Nostalgia is usually used when brand love drops. It’s emotional blackmail that works. We endorse and encourage this behaviour in our daily existence. While advertisers are by default dream merchants who sell aspirations, nostalgia is often used when love is lost. The brand, in a jilted reaction, says, ‘How can you forget me?’"
Take, for instance, Maggi, the popular instant noodle brand from Nestlé SA. Its comeback campaign in August 2015 was pegged on nostalgia for the product even before it returned to shelves after it was banned by the government for a few months for supposedly containing traces of lead beyond statutory limits.
The videos, posted by Nestlé India with the hashtag #WeMissYouToo, tried to keep the brand alive in consumers’ minds. All three videos created by McCann WorldGroup India feature single men and their association with Maggi.
One narrates how he never cared about home-delivery leaflets as long as he had Maggi; another says because of Maggi he did not have to wake up his mother at midnight; and the third talks about how he never needed to connect with his neighbours, because he always had Maggi.
Happy memories, it seems, lead to happy endings.
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