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This study aims to explore how emotionally rich collective experiences create lasting, shareable memories, which influence future behaviours. In particular, the role of others and of music in creating value through memories is considered using the concept of socially extended emotions.

Over 250 narratives were gathered from festival attendees in the UK and Finland. Respondents completed a writing task detailing their most vivid memories, what made them memorable, their feelings at the time and as they remembered them, and how they shared them. The narratives were then analysed thematically.

Collective emotion continues to be co-created long after the experience through memory-sharing. The music listened to is woven through this extension of the experience but is, surprisingly, not a critical part of it. The sociality of the experience is remembered most and was key to the memories shared afterwards. The added value of gathering memorable moments, and being able to share them with others, is clearly evidenced.

The study highlights the importance of designing events to create collective emotional moments that form lasting memories. This emphasizes the role of post-experience marketing and customer relationship building to enhance the value that is created customer-to-customer via memory sharing.

The research addresses the lack of literature exploring post-event experience journeys and the collective nature of these. It also deepens a theoretical understanding of the role of time and sociality in the co-creation and extension of emotions and their value in hospitality consumption. A model is proposed to guide future research.

Despite the relatively low cultural status of department store music, it is proposed that music – the shopping soundtrack – is capable of transforming perceptions of the environment in which it is heard, and eliciting immediate emotional and behavioural responses, thus underlining the influence of music, regardless of whether it is passively heard as a background element or actively listened to as a live performance in a dedicated venue.

This study addresses a gap in the marketing literature for introspective research evaluating the experience of music in service environments. It draws upon auto‐ethnographic data through which participants ponder their own consumption experience and provide detailed, subjective accounts of events and memories.

When considering the effects of music upon emotional, cognitive and behavioural responses, it highlights the importance of musicscape response moderators.

The service environment appears more exciting and attractive and may encourage increased spending when background music is congruous with other servicescape elements. Music with positive autobiographical resonance elicits pleasurably nostalgic emotions, positive evaluations and longer stay. However, the aural incongruity of unexpected silence in music‐free zones produces feelings of discomfort leading to negative store evaluation and departure.

Qualitative data are deliberately represented using typically positivist discourse to encourage resolution of the inherent tension between interpretivist and positivist perspectives and stimulate increased methodological integration (e.g. through future studies of music combining quantitative and qualitative data).

Working at the University of Liverpool alongside Julia Hallam and Lisa Shaw, and in the Department of Music, are Sara Cohen and Jacqueline Waldock. Both Sara and Jacky have led projects that engage with and support local organizations and communities, and examine music from the perspective of those involved. In fact, it was their shared interest in how ‘ordinary’ people engage with and experience music in everyday life that prompted them to join forces in 2014, and start working together on community engagement projects. At the same time, they have brought to these projects their own individual research interests and expertise. In this chapter, we discuss their recent collaboration on a project that explores the use of music to improve the wellbeing of older people in the UK, including people living with a dementia-related cognitive impairment and in nursing homes and health-care settings, and those who live independently but are cared for at day-care centres run by voluntary and community-based organizations. We situate this project within a selection of UK music initiatives or ‘interventions’ aimed at helping those living with dementia and age-related memory loss, and outline how specific projects informed our own approach and work.

This paper aims to investigate the effects of brand placement repetition in music videos on consumers’ memory, brand attitudes and behavioral intentions, as well as, explores the effective frequency needed to achieve optimal advertising impact.

The proposed hypotheses and research questions were tested using an experimental approach. Participants watched a block of music videos containing various levels of brand placement repetitions. Afterward, participants completed a questionnaire designed to measure memory, brand attitudes and behavioral intentions.

At low levels (below 4–5 exposures), the repetition of a brand placement has a positive effect on brand memory, brand attitudes, intentions to buy and to recommend the brand to others. However, further increases in repetition had detrimental effects on brand attitudes and purchase intentions, but not on memory measures. Additionally, the effects of brand placement repetition on brand attitudes and memory measures were moderated by respondents’ brand familiarity.

The effects of brand placements were measured through explicit tests that refer to the placement event. Researchers are encouraged to test suggested propositions by using implicit tests.

The results of this study can serve as guidance for marketing practitioners on optimal ways to integrate their brands into the contents of mass media programming.

Despite the increasing usage of music videos in marketing promotions, limited scholarship explores the effects of placing consumer brands in this promising medium. Current research addresses this gap and contributes both to brand placement literature and scholarship on advertising repetition.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how music consumption communities remember their past. Specifically, the paper reports on the role of heritage in constructing the cultural memory of a consumption community and on the implications for its identity and membership.

Drawing upon insights from theories of cultural memory, heritage, and collective consumption, this interpretive inquiry makes use of interview, documentary, and artefactual analysis, as well as visual and observational data, to analyse an exhibition of the community’s popular music heritage entitled One Family – One Tribe: The Art & Artefacts of New Model Army.

The analysis shows how the community creates a sense of its own past and reflects this in memories, imagination, and the creative work of the band.

This is a single case study, but one whose exploratory character provides fruitful insights into the relationship between cultural memory, imagination, heritage, and consumption communities.

The paper shows how consumption communities can do the work of social remembering and re-imagining of their own past, thus strengthening their identity through time.

The study shows clearly how a consumption community can engage, through memory and imagination, with its own past, and indeed the past in general, and can draw upon material and other resources to heritagise its own particular sense of community and help to strengthen its identity and membership.

The paper offers a theoretical framework for the process by which music consumption communities construct their own past, and shows how theories of cultural memory and heritage can help to understand this important process. It also illustrates the importance of imagination, as well as memory, in this process.

The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to the perception of music and the understanding of memory using cybernetic tools.

The work uses a methodological approach based on realistic evaluation to deploy two well‐established cybernetic models – the viable system model (VSM) and Luhmann's model of social systems – together with Harré's “Positioning Theory” to show how the process of mental construction and perception might be conceived. Drawing on reflections following a musical performance experiment at the American Cybernetics Society Conference in 2010, phenomenal issues of perception and memory are considered against the background of feedback mechanisms with a material and social environment.

The model situates the process of improvising music, the experience of listening to music, and the experience of recalling musical events within the context of a dynamic regulatory mechanism involving individual agents in a material and social environment.

The paper argues that a model for memory of co‐evolution between agency and environment has ethical and political implications, drawing particularly on recent application of Harré's Positioning Theory.

The bringing together of the VSM, Luhmann's theory and Positioning Theory helps to give more definition to the relationship between what Harré terms “engrams” and “exterograms” thus making possible more sophisticated models of distributed cognition.

This paper aims to examine the role of life satisfaction in consumers’ reaction to nostalgic music in an advertisement in terms of attitude toward the brand and purchase intention. It suggests that life satisfaction forms the lens through which individuals interpret and reconstruct past emotional experiences evoked by nostalgia. It further investigates the role of product category involvement in the interplay between life satisfaction and nostalgic music.

Two experiments were conducted. The first study featured a 2 (nostalgic vs non-nostalgic music) × 2 (high vs low involvement) between-subjects design and tested the research hypotheses with 208 consumers. The second study featured two involvement conditions (high vs low) and explored the underlying process behind the hypotheses. Linear regression was used to analyze the data in both studies.

For the low involvement product category, nostalgic music was more effective than non-nostalgic music for consumers with high life satisfaction, whereas non-nostalgic music was more effective for consumers with low life satisfaction levels. For the high involvement product category, life satisfaction did not moderate consumers’ reaction to nostalgic music.

This research suggests that past experiences evoked through nostalgic music are not static but are subject to bias and interpretation depending on an individual’s current mindset. Hence, the eventual effect of nostalgia is determined by how past events are reconstrued based on the individual’s current state.

This paper warns against the blind use of nostalgic appeals in advertising, points to the need to consider the audience’s state of mind, and suggests an opportunity to leverage life satisfaction influencers in designing effective advertising campaigns.

The findings have strong implications for public policymakers. The results are crucial as policymakers often use public service announcement (PSA) to change the attitude of the public toward some phenomena. Knowing the current state of life satisfaction in society, they can increase the efficiency of public service announcements by including a nostalgic song in them.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first one in the marketing literature that looks at the efficiency of nostalgic songs in advertisements. The authors tested the conceptual framework by using two studies and offered novel implications to both marketers and scholars.

To explore the value in reminiscing about past festivals as a potential way of improving wellbeing in socially isolated times.

The paper uses previous research on reminiscence, nostalgia and wellbeing to underpin the analysis of self-recorded memory narratives. These were gathered from 13 pairs of festivalgoers during Covid-19 restrictions and included gathering their individual memories and their reminiscences together. The participant pairs were a mix of friends, family and couples who had visited festivals in the UK, Finland and Denmark.

Four key areas that emerged through the analysis were the emotions of nostalgia and anticipation, and the processes of reliving emotions and bonding through memories.

Future studies could take a longitudinal approach to see how memory sharing evolves and the impact of this on wellbeing. The authors also recommend undertaking similar studies in other cultural settings.

This study findings have implications for both post-festival marketing and for the further development of reminiscence therapy interventions.

The method provides a window into memory sharing that has been little used in previous studies. The narratives confirm the value in sharing memories and the positive impact this has on wellbeing. They also illustrate that this happens through positive forms of nostalgia that centre on gratitude and lead to hope and optimism. Anticipation, not emphasised in other studies, was also found to be important in wellbeing and was triggered through looking back at happier times.