Search results

Framed by nostalgia marketing, this research draws upon lessons from ParticipACTION, a Canadian non-profit health promotion organization, to examine one of their most well-known campaigns, Body Break with ParticipACTION, in order to assess the potential role for nostalgia-based marketing campaigns in sport participation across generational cohorts.

Exploratory sequential mixed methods involving two studies were completed on behalf of ParticipACTION, with the authors developing the research instruments and the collection of the data undertaken by research agencies. Study 1 was the secondary analysis of qualitative data from five focus groups with different demographic compositions that followed a common question guide. Study 2 was a secondary data analysis of a pan-Canadian online survey with a sample (n = 1,475) representative of the overall adult population that assessed awareness of, and attitudes toward, ParticipACTION, Body Break, physical activity and sport participation. Path analysis tested a proposed model that was based on previous research on attitudes, brand and loyalty. Further, multi-group path analyses were conducted to compare younger generations with older ones.

The results provide direction and understanding of the importance of nostalgia in marketing sport participation programs across generational cohorts. For instance, in the four parent-adult focus groups, unaided references as well as frequent and detailed comments regarding Body Break were observed. Similarly, Millennials reported that Body Break was memorable, Canadian and nostalgic, with a mix of positive and negative comments. The importance of nostalgia was supported sequentially via results from the national survey. For example, while 54.1% of the 40–54 age-group associated ParticipACTION positively with Body Break, so did 49.8% of the 25–39-year age group, most of whom were not born when the promotion ran. Further, brand resonance was found to explain 4% more variance in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), the proxy for sport participation, for younger people compared to older people.

Results provide direction to brands, properties and agencies around the use of nostalgia in sport marketing campaigns and sponsorship efforts. For brands seeking to sponsor sport properties to alter their image with potential consumers in a new market, associating with a sport property that many view as nostalgic could improve the impact of the campaign. On the sport property side, event managers and marketers should both identify existing assets that members or fans are nostalgic about, as well as consider building nostalgia into current and new properties they develop.

This research is valuable to the sport marketing and sponsorship literature through several contributions. First, the use of nostalgia marketing, and nostalgia in general, is novel in the sport marketing and sponsorship literature, with future research in nostalgia and sponsorship recommended. Second, the potential to adopt or adapt Body Break to other sport participation and physical activity properties is empirically supported. Finally, the finding that very effective promotions can have a long-lasting effect, both on those who experienced the campaigns as well as younger populations who only heard about it, is notable.

Examining emotional solidarity that drives tourists’ nostalgia has received significant attention, offering valuable insights that can aid in the selection of a travel destination. However, tourists’ nostalgia, along with its antecedents—perceived safety risk and emotional solidarity, has gained less attention within the setting of Pakistan. Therefore, this research has been carried out and validated a research framework using the stimulus-organism-response model to investigate the links between perceived safety risk, emotional solidarity—welcoming nature, emotional closeness, sympathetic understanding, perceived nostalgia, and destination advocacy intentions. In addition, this model employed destination attachment—place identity and place dependence—as a boundary condition on the relationships between emotional solidarity and advocacy intentions.

This study collected 545 responses through two methods: offline distribution of print copies of the questionnaire and online surveys from domestic tourists who visited scenic destinations last year. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed using AMOS 26, and the PROCESS macro was conducted using IBM SPSS 28.

The findings highlighted that perceived safety risk negatively influences emotional solidarity—welcoming nature, emotional closeness, sympathetic understanding—, resulting in a positive effect on perceived nostalgia. Furthermore, tourists’ perceived nostalgia positively triggers advocacy intentions. The findings also confirmed the boundary conditions of destination attachment—place identity and place dependence—on the association between emotional solidarity and perceived nostalgia.

Three major practical implications of these findings: First, ensuring visitor safety with smart security measures, digital tools for quick response, and local community involvement. Second, highlighting local markets, art, and architecture to enrich cultural experiences and promote accessibility and diversity. Finally, using marketing to generate nostalgic experiences through local collaborations, professional storytelling, and engaging social media content to build emotional ties and curiosity.

In terms of originality, this is pioneering research intended at developing and validating the model in the context of Pakistani destinations. Furthermore, this marks the initial step in examining the proposed relationships between perceived safety risk and emotional solidarity in fostering tourists' perceived nostalgia, ultimately leading to a strong desire to advocate for the destination.

The study examines tourists' psychological and social risk and shared beliefs – devotion, concerns and entertainment – at a religious and cultural heritage destination. It also examines how shared beliefs impact tourists’ nostalgia. Further, it examines whether nostalgia affects choice deferral and revisit intentions. Finally, it investigates how moderation of place attachment strengthens the link between shared beliefs – devotion, concerns, entertainment and nostalgia.

The data were collected from 439 inbound tourists, with 272 completing online questionnaires and 167 participating in face-to-face survey. Data analysis was performed using Amos 24.0 and SPSS 25.0, employing structural equation modeling (SEM) and the PROCESS macro.

The findings suggest that perceived psychological and social risk negatively impacts tourists' shared beliefs – devotion, concerns and entertainment – which positively impacts nostalgia. Positive nostalgic association boosts revisit intention and hampers choice deferral. The data also show how strong place attachment strengthens the relationship between shared beliefs – devotion, concerns and entertainment – and tourists’ perceived nostalgia.

This work contributes to information behavior using S-O-R theory. It analyzes the psychological and social risks of destination visits and how nostalgia affects shared beliefs and revisit intentions. Management and policymakers at destination enterprises can use the findings to design measures to enhance revisit intentions despite risk considerations.

Pakistan's destination tourism is underutilized amid its religious and cultural heritage significance. The literature has ignored how perceived psychological and social risk affects travelers' shared beliefs and nostalgic feelings. Thus, this study suggests and validates these linkages utilizing stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) theory in Pakistan's unique environment with inbound tourists.

The utterly un-nostalgic person is probably a non-existent being. At both a personal and collective level, we explore how nostalgia is experienced and in demand during times of transition, disjuncture, conflict and uncertainty. This chapter explores the emotion of nostalgia and connects it specifically to the current corona pandemic – the challenges of lockdowns and social distancing measures on interaction, feelings of loneliness and a generalised sense of uncertainty and despair, and also a rise of nostalgia as a possible response to these challenges. The predominant view of nostalgia put forth in this chapter is that nostalgia has the capacity to provide a great deal of benefit (meaning, hope, direction and purpose) to individuals, groups, institutions and societies at large. Indeed, nostalgia can be a tranquil feeling in a fearful world. We relate nostalgia to studies and experiences from the pandemic period and speculate on how the so-called ‘corona crisis’ may impact feelings of nostalgia in the post-pandemic world – perhaps even a nostalgia and longing for the pandemic period itself.

If the corona pandemic has in fact sparked a new (or renewed) interest in nostalgia in contemporary society due to the corona pandemic, it may indeed prove to be a positive thing, particularly if it makes it easier for people to deal with current feelings of adversity and anxiety. We suggest the nostalgia mood that is generated and perpetuated by the continuing twists and turns of the corona pandemic may – in the short and long run – prove useful in coping with and giving meaning to the problems and perplexing circumstances of life, rather than being a regressive phenomenon. Perhaps, something good may, in the end, grow from something bad?

The extant literature documents the significance of nostalgia-evoking stimuli in promoting consumer behavior. Despite the prevalent use of nostalgia-evoking stimuli in restaurant service, research on nostalgia-evoking restaurants is significantly lacking. As a result, little is known about customers’ cognitive responses toward nostalgia-themed restaurant stimuli and their influences on customer loyalty behavior. Thus, grounded in an extended stimulus-organism-response model, this study aims to examine the role of nostalgia-evoking restaurant stimuli in explaining an integrated model focusing on nostalgia, in relation to local food consumption value, familiarity with nostalgia-triggering restaurants and loyalty and continued patronage.

The authors collected data from 544 Taiwanese customers at nostalgia-themed restaurants. Using PROCESS (Model 6), the direct and indirect effect of nostalgia-evoking restaurant stimuli on loyalty and continued patronage were examined.

The confirmatory factor analysis results showed that five domains of restaurant attributes (i.e., service staff, exterior and interior design, furniture and tableware, local food and atmosphere) are nostalgia-evoking stimuli. The authors also found that these nostalgia-evoking stimuli significantly affected customer loyalty indirectly, through customers’ consumption value and familiarity.

The results of this study help identify the importance of nostalgia-generating cues in nostalgia-themed restaurants and their roles in postpurchase behaviors. The outcomes contribute to an improved understanding of how to exploit nostalgic sentiments in nurturing diners’ consumption value, maintaining customer loyalty and generating greater profits.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few studies examining restaurant attributes evoking nostalgia and explaining the mechanism by which nostalgia-evoking stimuli affect consumer behavior.

This study aims to use a theoretical-based case study of two distinct ownership groups of the Jack Daniel’s brand to explore how rhetorical history (i.e. malleability of the past for strategic goals) may evoke and capitalize on different forms of nostalgia. Within, the authors configure four forms of nostalgia (i.e. personal, historical, collective and cultural) from the individual or collective interaction and level of direct experience one has with the past as lived or happened.

This study uses an historical research approach which involved the identification of primary and secondary sources, facility tour, source criticism and triangulation to create themes of rhetorical history infused with nostalgic narratives using compelling evidence through rich description of this fusion.

The findings reveal how nostalgia-driven narratives reflecting different collective longing for the re-creation of an American Paradise Lost used by Jack Daniel (i.e. the man) and later but differently by Brown-Forman. This study uncovers how the company’s inherited past was used rhetorically throughout its history, beginning with the nostalgic story of Jack Daniel and the distillery’s nostalgically choreographed location in Lynchburg, Tennessee. This study delves into this setting to highlight the importance of symbols, details, emotional appeals and communications for collective memory and identity development and to showcase the ways in which they are influenced by different types and forms of nostalgia.

This study adds to a limited number of studies focused on understanding the impact of founders on an organization’s brand and how that is malleable. This study responds to scholarly calls to study the influence of sequenced historical rhetoric on an organization and highlight the relevance of social emotions such as nostalgia for rhetorical history. Finally, the theoretical contribution involves the advancing and construction of a theory typology of nostalgia previously proposed by Havlena and Holak in 1996.

The spread of technology usage and the increasing popularity of network technology have formed a basis for alternative working systems as virtual teams and teleworking in the working environment. However, social relations have weakened in these working systems and loneliness has become a common emotion in the workplace. Hence, the concept of loneliness has attracted significant interest in recent years. Yet, despite this interest, research examining loneliness in the workplace is limited in the literature. This study aims to investigate the role of workplace loneliness on intrinsic motivation and the effect of intrinsic motivation on employee well-being through the moderating role of organizational nostalgia.

Data were collected from 380 respondents working in different sectors. The hypotheses were tested by using structural equation modeling and PROCESS macro for SPSS.

Results empirically showed that workplace loneliness negatively relates to intrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation positively relates to employee well-being, intrinsic motivation mediates the link between workplace loneliness and employee well-being and organizational nostalgia moderates the link between workplace loneliness and intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, organizational nostalgia also moderates the indirect effect of workplace loneliness on employee well-being through intrinsic motivation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study contributes to the existing literature on workplace loneliness by investigating underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions for loneliness in the workplace.

Using Generation Z consumers from China as an example and focusing on the nostalgia-driven design of brand spokes-character, this study sought to update research on the causal relationship between nostalgia and brand attitude for younger consumers. Two types of nostalgic brand spokes-characters (i.e., eliciting personal nostalgia and historical nostalgia) were examined separately and compared to verify their contributions to more positive brand attitude, as well as related mechanisms, that is, whether consumer trust in the spokes-character mediated the relationship between nostalgic spokes-characters and brand attitude.

An experiment was first conducted to test the causal effects of brand spokes-characters designed to elicit two types of nostalgic feelings (i.e., personal nostalgia and historical nostalgia). Then, the authors investigated the influencing mechanism of nostalgic brand spokes-characters based on bootstrap mediation models.

The results revealed that for less familiar brand spokes-characters, either type of nostalgia-driven design would enhance consumers' brand attitude. Moreover, consumer trust in the spokes-character mediated the relationship between personal-nostalgic brand spokes-characters and brand attitude.

This study was the first to examine personal nostalgia and historical nostalgia separately regarding the effects of nostalgic spokes-characters and related mechanisms. By combining methods of experimental design and bootstrap mediation modeling, it provided a more robust evaluation of nostalgia-driven design, and supported using certain nostalgic styles for designing brand spokes-characters, which can help modern brands draw more interest from young consumers and promote more positive brand attitude.

The authors sought to examine how nostalgic feelings influenced purchase intentions of sport fans towards branded merchandise. Additionally, the goal was to test the childhood brand nostalgia (CBN) scale to see if it was an effective measure in this context. This was an important early step in understanding the way nostalgia may influence sport fan's merchandise preferences.

Surveys were completed by 601 fans of two professional sport teams in the USA. These consumers were targeted geographically through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and half given a modern branded t-shirt and the other half a retro branded t-shirt. To examine brand nostalgia in this context, the CBN measure was evaluated and examined to see its impact on each group, using hierarchical regressions.

The results demonstrated that CBN positively impacted consumers purchase intentions in the retro logoed t-shirt group. However, in the modern logoed t-shirt group, CBN did not significantly influence purchase intentions.

The findings of this study suggest that retro merchandise is working as expected, as it is attractive to those who feel nostalgic about their team. Secondarily, this study's findings suggest it may be vital for marketers to be conscious that their retro materials are connecting to the past.

This study was an early examination of a measure of nostalgia and its impact on purchase intentions in sport. The findings suggested that this CBN instrument may be appropriate in retro marketing research, especially regarding sport merchandise. Further, the findings suggest that nostalgic feelings may be influential toward retro merchandise, but not modern merchandise.

This study aimed to examine how sport fans' nostalgia influenced their revisit intention to stadiums. Using data collected during the Covid-19 pandemic, the study further analyzed the moderation effect of sport fans' match attendance on the relationship between nostalgia and revisit intention.

The study used an online survey querying baseball and football fans in Japan (n = 863). These leagues completed their 2020 regular season with and without crowds due to the pandemic. Nostalgia was measured using three dimensions: sports team, environment and socialization. The model was tested using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM). Multigroup SEM also investigated the moderating effect of match attendance in 2020.

In the proposed model, nostalgia for sport teams significantly influenced sport fans' intention to revisit stadiums. Nostalgia for sport teams encouraged fans who attended live sport matches during the pandemic more than fans who did not attend the live matches. Nostalgia for sport environment and socialization did not significantly affect sport fans' intentional behavior. However, the results revealed that non-attending fans were stimulated to return to stadiums by nostalgia for the environment.

This study examined the individual impacts of the sport fans' nostalgia dimensions. These nostalgia dimensions were omitted in previous studies. Our findings and proposed model may be used by practitioners in sports teams and leagues to deal with fans' perceived loss of the sport during the Covid-19 pandemic.