Marketing the past: a literature review and future directions for researching retro, heritage, nostalgia, and vintage

Abstract

Over the last decades, marketing literature has persistently been interested in how marketers and consumers alike engage with the past through past-themed brands, products, and services. However, our knowledge on past-themed marketing is scattered and treated in largely separated literature streams on retro, heritage, nostalgia, and vintage. This article reviews marketing literature on retro, heritage, nostalgia, and vintage–and their ontological, methodological, and axiological underpinnings–to synthesise a differential overview of these streams and contribute shared future research directions for researching and understanding past-themed marketing. Thus, based on our review, we identify and discuss areas for future research on marketing the past, specifically concerned with authenticity complexities and marketing management perspectives.