Silvabrand | What's Old is New Again
Silva Brand

What’s Old Is New Again

Feb 28, 2022 | by Team Silva
3 min

Decades-old fads and styles remind us of simpler times – before masks and booster shots and languishing. And so, companies will reintroduce bygone images and pop icons into their advertising campaigns to give audiences the warm and fuzzies. The practice of using erstwhile cultural crazes to make a brand more appealing is called “nostalgia marketing.” Fabrik’s blog says that “in today’s highly competitive marketplace, nostalgia in advertising can allow both new, and old brands to connect with their audience on a powerful emotional level.” Consider how a classic Adobe campaign and a more recent Burger King spot used nostalgia marketing in very different ways.

Computer software company Adobe is aimed at digital artists. Adobe’s website says that they “connect content and data and introduce new technologies that democratize creativity, shape the next generation of storytelling, and inspire entirely new categories of business.” This helps explain why they turned to the late painting instructor, Bob Ross to promote Adobe Photoshop Sketch, an app that subscribers use to create art on the iPad Pro. With his gentle manner and upbeat sayings (think “happy accidents”), Bob Ross, host of the public television art program The Joy of Painting from 1983 to 1994, was the ideal person to show consumers how user-friendly the app was. Sadly, though, Ross passed away in 1995, about ten years before Sketch came on the scene. But Adobe found a way: The company teamed up with illustrator Chad Cameron to produce a series of short online videos in which he played a Ross-like artist who used Sketch to create masterpieces. Blogger Nicole Vandermeulen of thecreativeham.com wrote that Cameron’s “likeness to Ross is uncanny, from the afro to the way Cameron dismisses the use of the Undo button because there’s ‘just happy accidents’ in sketching.” The campaign was lauded by other advertising experts, including ADWEEK journalist Tim Nudd who bestowed it with the Ad of the Day title on Feb.17, 2016.

More recently, fast-food giant Burger King brought back its old-school look when reimagining their brand. The company says on its website that their “commitment to premium ingredients, signature recipes, and family-friendly dining experiences is what has defined their brand for more than 50 successful years.” In 2021, Burger King decided to express that commitment through a total rebranding, a bold step considering they hadn’t done one in more than two decades. Ralph Abreu, Burger King’s former head of design, told Fast Company contributor Savanna Bous that “we knew that off the bat, the logo needed to be redesigned – it was looking very dated. And it wasn’t helping to communicate real, delicious, simple, warm food – it kind of contradicted all of what we want to convey.” And so, they looked over their long history and decided to go back to their stylistic roots for their aesthetic revamp. According to Business Insider: Indiajournalist Mary Meisenzahl, their new logo “is a modern version of the classic BK look, putting the restaurant name between two buns. All the branding was redesigned in colors inspired by the whopper, too, including yellow, brown, red, and orange with a new ‘Flame’ font.” The blast from the past worked. After the rebranding, "the fast-food underdog out-performed McDonald’s by 66% with consumer purchase intent. Customer visitation intent increased by 39%, and Burger King received 1.1 billion impressions in the first five days of the rebrand. The company’s stock rose by 7.8%,” according to Bous.

Nostalgia marketing gives companies like Adobe and Burger King a competitive edge by providing consumers with an antidote to modern-life fatigue. In efficaci, digital marketing expert Anil Kumar writes that “with people being glued to social media and mobile phones throughout their waking hours, data chaos rules supreme. We live in a busy world and under a lot of stress. Getting nostalgic and remembering the old times always gives people a much-needed release. The remembrance of a simpler life, a stress-free day, is something we cherish.”