How Advertising has Classified Nostalgia
A recent article on market research in post-Soviet Russia illustrates the extent that nostalgia has been codified as a powerful instrument. Consider this abstract of the essay “Nostalgia in post-socialist Russia: Exploring applications to advertising strategy”:
This article investigates nostalgia in post-socialist Russia from a consumer behavior perspective. The research includes the following components: 1) an overview of nostalgia and nostalgia proneness as a personality trait among Russians in the context of recent societal changes, 2) an analysis of four categories of nostalgia (personal, interpersonal, cultural, and virtual) and themes in nostalgia experiences provided by Russian respondents, and 3) a discussion of specific stimuli and advertising content in the Russian marketplace designed to evoke individual and collective nostalgia. The major nostalgia themes—specifically, the break-up of the Soviet Union, nature, and food—identified in the Russian responses are related to advertising and marketing elements for Russian products. The article also discusses the implications of consumer nostalgia for marketing and advertising strategy in the post-socialist Russian economy.
“Nostalgia” as a marketing science is even more pointedly discussed in an article for the American-based Journal of Advertising titled “The power of reflection: an empirical examination of nostalgia advertising effects”. The writer, David Sprott, comments:
With the rise of nostalgia in popular culture, marketing research attention has been garnered with a focus to define, categorize, and/or measure the construct in an effort to understand more fully how it influences consumer behavior (e.g., Baker and Kennedy 1994; Havlena and Holak 1991; Pascal, Sprott, and Muehling 2002; Rindfleisch and Sprott 2000). Among these efforts have been a small number of studies examining nostalgia's influence within an advertising context.
Specifically, this investigation examines the following research questions:
While the managerial relevance of such an investigation is obvious (i.e., to test the relative efficacy of nostalgic ads), the findings of this study have theoretical significance as well, for they contribute to our growing understanding of how processes and factors related to nostalgia may influence consumer judgments.
“Ideological” Nostalgia
The suppression and “mystification” that the uses of ideology produce are linked to nostalgia (for more on Ideology in general, Terry Eagleton’s Ideology: An Introduction, is a good place to start). In 1965, Althusser remarked that “in ideology the real relation is inevitably invested in the imaginary relation, a relation that expresses a will (conservative, conformist, reformist or revolutionary), a hope or a nostalgia, rather than describing reality.” When Huncheon describes nostalgia as having a “distancing effect that sanitizes as it selects, making the past feel complete, stable, coherent, safe from the unexpected…” - he could be describing the desired result of ideology as well.
The same strategies used by advertising are brought into play by propagandists to justify current political adventures – for Americans, the perceived enemy has, and apparently always will be, compared to Hitler; it’s a nostalgic fait accompli as World War Two is the only fully justifiable conflict accessible to direct memory (and, in terms of mitigated nostalgia, WW2 has and continues to be relentlessly mythologized).
There are countless examples of how the cold dish of Iraq was served up re-heated by nostalgia – always with the shadow of Hitler looming over the process (Just one from the Boston Globe in 2002: “In a speech to students on the eve of a two-day NATO summit, Mr. Bush compared the challenge of the Iraqi President to the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, which led to World War II. Suggesting that terrorism was as dangerous as Hitler in the 1940s, Mr. Bush told the teenagers: ‘We face perils we've never thought about, perils we've never seen before. They're just as dangerous as those perils that your fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers faced.’” In another seamless WW2 analogy, the twin towers disaster has been called "the Republicans’ Pearl Harbor," because of the opportunity it presented to rally the electorate around Bush and continue him in power, as Pearl Harbor did for FDR (Russell Drake, 2004).
Of course, the anti-war forces used the same frames with gusto – as often as Bush compared Hitler to Saddam Hussein, Bush himself was analogized with Der Fuhrer and WW2 propaganda was re-assigned to contemporary parody.
Historical uses of ideological nostalgia: Nazi Germany
One example of an historical use of nostalgia by a totalitarian regime would include strategies developed by the propaganda wing of the Nazis; direct nostalgia for the glory days before the chaos of WW1 and the Weimar Republic provided a nimble mitigated frame to which to cast and justify their abuses of power. Through film and literature, they used indirect nostalgia to create the longing in the young for the origins of German power from Bismarck back to Frederick the Great. In general, the nostalgic was stressed to the negation of anything individualistic, de-familiarizing or “modern”. Historical films and novels that hailed German colonial conquests were popular as well as “peasant” novels which rejected Internationalism for the sake of a simple, agrarian life (the muddy tracks of Heidegger’s peasant shoes from “The Origin of the Work of Art” are evident here).
The photographer Hadje-Halke continued “modernist” experiments well into the Nazi-era…a double standard?
From the earliest years of the Nazi regime, visual art was drained of the personal and transformed into stereotypical forms within a new collective consciousness (Himmler paid a compliment to the portrait painter of SS men when he remarked about their pictures, “The longer you look at the faces the more familiar they seem”.) Artists were forced to sign “Approval Oaths” which outlined the themes and subject matter deemed appropriate. These guidelines were at once terse and rather misty-eyed (artists were encouraged to describe “eternal values”, “purity”, etc.). Hitler’s war against “cultural disintegration” required the typical painter to toe the line within Romantic and Symbolist aesthetics from the 19th century. This style and the genres associated with them –peasant landscapes, reclining/docile female nudes, family gatherings, collective unity in labor/industrial scenes - were endlessly re-hashed in what is the dullest corpus of painted works in humanity’s history.
Photography was given slightly more stylistic room (occasionally more modernistic Nazi photography could hide under the guise of “scientific experimentation”), but in general “fine art” photography was shunted into very specific genres (landscapes, portraits, workers, technological achievement), with the same non-specificity as painting. In the case of my work, I use photographic sources from this era precisely because the images are (seemingly) banal. Viewers of my work respond to the nostalgic gauze but the images are non-specific enough to allow multiple interpretations without “alerting” them to the real source.
A painting of the “Official Exhibition of German Art” - a 19th Century museum in 1937…but the art is “contemporary”.
Significantly, Germany has had an historic ban on symbols and slogans relating to their Nazi past – on a cultural level, “nostalgia” for this era has been shunted to underground status (Last August, A Berlin federal appeals court ruled that people can be prosecuted for displaying Nazi slogans in Germany - but only if they are written in German. In 2005, after Prince Harry brandished his “swastika outfit” at a party, factions within the EU parliament demanded a continent-wide ban on the symbol.) Although the eradication of loaded symbols hasn’t stamped out racism or skinheads in Germany, this sharply applied censorship has curtailed its application in popular culture and denied those nostalgic for Hitler-era order a visual tool.
Not so for other countries with totalitarian pasts; a Russian colleague of mine once lamented that the USSR (and later, Russia) hadn’t promoted a similar ban against Stalin. Unlike the German culture, which was ordered to make a full disclosure of the Holocaust and the other millions of executions that took place during WW2, the 20-odd-million unfortunates that Stalin sent to Gulags were seldom compensated or recognized; past a small crack of light that illuminated the Khruschev-era, a Nuremberg-like judgment was never pronounced concerning Stalin’s misdeeds. The same scenario exists in China in relation to Mao’s excesses during the Cultural Revolution. One of the current consequences of this has been free and open nostalgia for bygone eras that are– seen objectively – abhorrent.
“Corps Worker, USA, 1939”
“U.S.S.R., 1962”
The “Labor” trope
“Autobahn, 1935”