Can a company born before its youngest consumers suddenly become attractive to them as well? The Financial Times provocatively asked itself this question a few days ago, telling the story of the new strategy of Yahoo, an icon of the first era of the Internet born in 1994 and committed to doing something apparently impossible: turning over thirty years of digital history into a competitive advantage in the age of artificial intelligence. After all, the new CEO Jim Lanzone decided to hire the American rapper and performer Cardi B, one of the most recognizable figures in pop culture and already a Grammy winner, making her the protagonist of the new Yahoo Mail campaign for Planner, an AI-based assistant. Ah, the eternal youth of the Internet: after all, the tech giant decides to refresh itself by winking at new audiences. “There is something inherently reliable about being the original in this sector. We were the first and we want to look out there again,” Lanzone said. A strategy that turns history from a potential burden into a repositioning lever.
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Remixing history
This is not an isolated case. According to the international research “Then is now” conducted by Vevo, a global music video network, 65% of the Generation Z declare feeling nostalgia for eras they have never lived through, and one in three young people even claim to feel born in the wrong generation. The survey involved 1,800 consumers from the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Thus, the past of others becomes one’s own emotional memory. YouGov finds that for 65% of American zoomers, the ’90s represent a fashionable era. And nostalgia can even reach the wallet: in experimental conditions, Generation Z shows willingness to pay to access old brands. In short, far from being a mere flashback operation, the past can generate economic value in the present.
But how can they feel nostalgia for something they have never experienced? A recent study published in the Journal of Consumer Marketing titled “But you weren’t there!” comes to the rescue, with an exclamation mark unusual even for the smartest researchers. In summary: there is an under-30 generation that re-evaluates eras prior to their personal memory. The concept at play is historical nostalgia, that is, nostalgia for past experiences. Through qualitative interviews with young people aged 18 to 24, the study shows that aesthetics and representations of the past can generate emotional attachment, idealization, and consumption behaviors even in those who have not lived that past. This is well known by premium brands that, instead of desperately chasing youth, have decided to leverage their wrinkles. This is why we talk about the heritage economy.
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“For decades, being a tech giant from the past was almost a sentence: the Internet rewarded the new, the disruptive, the startup that replaced the incumbent. Now technological saturation and the search for authenticity overturn the perspective,” writes Daniel Thomas also in the Financial Times. The past becomes a competitive asset again, but on one condition: it cannot simply be re-proposed. Because those brands that decide to remix it prevail: they take recognizable codes and transform them into contemporary languages. Digital technologies allow preserving and recreating the past, making elements coexist in a temporal short circuit: brands become simultaneously old and new. This is the “forever young” effect. Thus, historians conquer the very young and new market segments. Reuters reports how they are doing this by combining heritage and novelty. By 2030, Generation Z could represent about 25% of global luxury spending. Far from scrapping the past. In the economy of eternal youth, memories become assets transforming into competitive capital. Thus, in the nostalgia economy, an archive can be worth as much as an innovation lab. A recipe that unites generations: what is a memory for parents can become a discovery for zoomers.
Icons in the future
There are a myriad of new marketing campaigns at stake. First of all, there is the return of the pioneers. Polaroid has transformed what seemed a limitation, namely analog, into a new experience for a generation raised inside screens: in an Out Of Home campaign, the unique and imperfect shot becomes almost revolutionary.
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