Memories for sale: nostalgia is big business

The marketing of memories is not a new phenomenon and it certainly isn’t confined to music. Advertisers know that nostalgia moves products and they are masters at using it.

Employed effectively, nostalgia can sell everything from beer to BMWs, credit cards to Coke.

Hell, if I were asked to sell a million litres of Carlton Draught, I would have the Hoodoo Gurus on the phone straight away (pending Cold Chisel’s availability, of course.)

It seems that nostalgia is not just a simple yearning for the “good old days” any more, but a cynical marketing tool. Marketers take our own ideas of nostalgia and morph it into something different.

Memories have become big business as key moments in history have become intertwined with products.

Nostalgia marketing has become so ubiquitous it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell what memories of the past are real and what are not.

History is almost being rewritten as advertisers create an idealised version of the past which foregoes reality.

Tellingly, it’s not just history’s big moments that advertisers play on. Emotions as simple as a primary school crush or the fun one can have at a beach have been manipulated into instruments to sell things to us.

Put a Coldplay song behind a poorly-acted nuclear family scene and voila! You’ve got yourself an ad for a Low Rate Credit Card.

As consumers, we seem to have blatantly fallen for this smoke and mirrors trick.

But this is more than just consumer habits; it’s also a damning reflection of society.

We have embedded ourselves so deeply into this hyper-consumer culture that we now have no time to make our own memories - we have to buy them!