What kind of product does the person who feel nostalgia buy? Examine the effect of product types

Abstract

Recently in Korea, retro style is all the vogue. The retro style began with Korean soap operas, movies, and many of famous TV shows and now it has a positive effect overall in Korea trend. Result from this trend, a lot of brands, products, and fashion which were caught on the past are enjoying a renaissance, and the people who pursue the retro style are seen at various ages. This retro style can be explained as ‘nostalgia’. Nostalgia can arouse positive emotions than negative emotions and people would recall that the past experiences were warm enough because of these positive emotions. Therefore, Nostalgia is an effective marketing strategy to induce positive responses by evoke positive emotions of consumers. On marketing field, there are many researches that focus on the various effect of nostalgia. However, existing studies have been limited to past products causing the Nostalgia, and the product itself has not been considered in various aspects. Especially, there are little researches on the types of products that affect attitude changes and purchase intention in the role of nostalgia. Therefore, this study aims to provide the theoretical and practical implications to search for what types of products that consumers want to purchase according to the type of product when the nostalgia is evoked. This research is composed of one experiment and the study and 67 undergraduates at the university in Korea and 48 participants on online survey are took part in. This study is designed by 2X2 factorial design (nostalgia and types of product). Participants were given each scenario that nostalgia situation and control situation, and show each types of product (based of goods vs based of experience) checked purchase intention and wrote amount of money that willing to pay. To test this study, I use t-test, ANOVA, and Process Modeling to analyze. The result of manipulation check was good enough and the main effect show that consumers in the context of nostalgia are more likely to purchase. Finally, the interaction effect of nostalgia and types of products shows that consumers with nostalgia were more likely to purchase experience based products than just product based ones. As in previous studies, this study also found that nostalgia increases purchase intentions. It seems that nostalgia has raised consumers' purchasing intentions by reminding them of past positive recall. And experience based products increased consumers' purchasing intention more than product based one. In other words, it would be more effective to promote products based on experience (travel, events, etc.) through advertising with nostalgic effects.