I’m settling down to a quick dinner of Findus Crispy Pancakes. I’m eating quickly because I’ve got tickets to see The Eagles tonight (I’ve been listening to their new LP on my retro Teac turntable), but I’ll take a Wispa as a snack to have on the way.
The thing is, this is 2010 and the Findus Crispy Pancake is the modern, beef-and-onion-filled equivalent of Proust’s madeleine, a bite of which can trigger a happy flashback to earlier, more innocent times. Back in the 1970s and '80s, TV shows such as Tomorrow’s World told us we’d be living in space by now, wearing silver suits and having robots do all the work. But increasingly what we’re actually doing is transporting ourselves back to the 1970s and '80s. So why are we so obsessed with products from the past, and is the nostalgia boom of ‘heritage brands’ a good or a bad thing?
The background to our love affair with the past lies in the economy, the fragmentation of traditional marketing channels and the fact that, for business, the past is cheaper and easier to market. As Niall McKinney, founder of online marketing community Utalk Marketing puts it: “It’s getting harder than ever to get marketing cut-through when attention spans are measured in seconds. So it’s easier to revive a brand than try and create a new one.”
We have always hankered after the things from our past, because they connect us with a time of fulfilment, lack of responsibility and pure enjoyment. But in recent years the heritage industry has entered almost every aspect of life. At the shops we’ve seen, for instance, the return of the Cadbury’s Wispa, not to mention the Milky Bar Kid and the original white Fairy Liquid bottle. The Findus Crispy Pancake never went away but is currently enjoying a renaissance after being voted “retro food of the year” in a survey of GMTV viewers. On the roads, Fiat has brought us its retro-styled new 500 to join the ranks of new Minis and Volkswagen Beetles.
According to recent research by Standard Life, 128 major bands reformed between 2007 and 2009, including the likes of Blur and Take That. A large chunk of Hollywood’s output has been remakes and film versions of old TV shows – the big budget A-Team movie the Yogi Bear movie, Wall Street 2 and the new version of The Karate Kid, for example. Fashion endlessly recycles previous decades. Even my new jeans look as if someone else has worn them for years and if I’m buying a new guitar I can pay extra (yes, extra) for someone at the factory to drop it a few times, burn it with cigarettes and hit it with a chisel to make it look ‘vintage’.
Standard Life’s research also suggests that at the same time, those who are indulging in the most nostalgia – the 28-to-40 age group – are not only looking back, but failing to look forward. Many have little or no financial preparation for old age, and a third expect fate to intervene at some point to secure their future.
According to chartered psychologist Ben Williams, the recent nostalgia brand boom is symptomatic of a society caught between a recession and a rapid rate of technological change. “When times are good and life is easy, there is less nostalgia around, and when times are hard, people look back at ‘the good old days’,” he says. “That is what’s happening now. With the credit crunch, the recession, war in Iraq and Afghanistan, every time you turn on the news there is such grief – so people are looking back to more comforting times.
“At the same time, the rate of change is becoming too fast for many people. People find change exciting but also worrying. So things that have been around for a while, or they remember from childhood, have an air of reliability that helps them cope.”
Of course, the entrepreneur sees opportunities in every challenge, and the downturn, and the nostalgia that has sprung from it, offers a double hit to those with something to sell.“At the same time as the consumer appeal for products from a time when things seemed better, there is also a drive to make business more efficient,” says Graham Hales, MD of brand experts Interbrand.
“People have brands sitting in their portfolios that they can reignite relatively cheaply. There’s a kind of marriage there on both sides and it works for the consumer and the producer. We’ll get bored with it eventually but at the same time, nostalgia is such a broad topic that we’ll simply move to a different point in time, from the 80s to the 90s or back to the 70s again.”
Indeed, it’s not just the products themselves that are coming back, it’s also the advertising that comes with them, since this is where the relationship with the consumer was formed.
“Many brands that have survived are now dusting off their old advertising and reusing it rather than coming up with new slogans,” says Ben Williams. Heinz, for example, has returned to its “Beans Meanz Heinz” line. “It establishes a relationship with people that goes back a long time. When they see adverts from the past it reminds them of their own past and they want to re-establish experiences for themselves. In the same way, for example, I drive a Jaguar S Type because it reminds me of my dad’s Jaguar.”
There is another reason why we hark back to the past more than we used to. We simply have more past to look back at. The pre-war generations moved swiftly from childhood straight to adulthood. With the invention of teenagers and youth culture from the 1950s onwards, coupled with advances in medicine, life is now split not into childhood and adulthood, but lots of different life sectors along the way.
“There was a feeling that as you became an adult you made the transition into classical music and left the things of youth behind,” says Graham Hales. “As we now live a lot longer, we need more things to remind us of our youth and stop us going ‘fuddy-duddy’ too early. Those of us who have a number of years under our belts have bought jeans that are drainpipe, flares, stonewash and so on. We’ve seen them all before and we sort of know that we’ll go back to them again.”
He is adamant, though, that if you’re going to reanimate a brand, it had better fit in with the modern world.
“If you bring something back, it still has to deliver to what are the prevailing tastes. So a Wispa bar, for example – well, our chocolate tastes haven’t really changed dramatically, so you can tick the box marked ‘Will the product deliver?’ Something like Crispy Pancakes is potentially a slightly more difficult one, because our food consumption habits have changed and that feels like more of a challenge. I think you can get people to trial the product again but it feels to me as if food consumption has moved in a different direction.”
Niall McKinney agrees. “Brands like that tap into a time when choices were, or at least seemed, simpler. Nostalgia is a powerful emotional tactic that can make people buy a product without any logical analysis of its benefits. So in a world where we are more food obsessed and health obsessed than ever, you can still get people to at least try Findus Crispy Pancakes again purely out of nostalgia.”
One place where the commercial effect of nostalgia has really been felt is the music industry. Bands are brands, after all. As the industry itself struggles to come to terms with downloading, MySpace, the ease with which anyone can record at professional quality in their bedroom and the huge fragmentation of genres, the one thing that the major labels can control is the back catalogue of artists and music. Add to this the revival of live music as a money-spinner and it doesn’t take long to convince a band to reform, play the old hits to packed out arenas and cash in.
“Music brings back memories, so people can remember where they were in the 80s, for example,” says Hales. “Also it’s efficient economically for the record companies to promote it. Musical genres change so rapidly and dramatically now and it can be difficult for someone whose heritage is in the 80s to get into modern drum and bass, for example. Music can feel foreign to people so again, it’s about that comfort zone and reliving happy times.”
It’s not just the customers who are reliving happier times, either. “At the moment the future is terribly difficult for the music industry so there’s a degree of security around the past for them,” he says.
And it is this uncertainty about the future that keeps us in the past. “For all of us,” says Hales, ”in whatever industry, the question ‘What will the world be like in five years?’ will always be a lot more difficult to answer than ‘What was the world like five years ago?’"
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