- I hate jazz.
- [Ryan] What do you mean, you hate jazz?
- [Narrator] I'm Alex Berman,
and you're watching Selling Breakdowns.
2016's La La Land was a huge critical
and box office success,
picking up six Academy Awards
and making almost $450 million at the box office,
in spite of $30 million budget,
pretty small by blockbuster standards.
The movie itself is a love letter to classic Hollywood,
full of song and dance set pieces
and a storyline all about making the big time.
And although it's set in the modern world,
this is a warm look backwards
and plays on one of our most powerful emotions, nostalgia.
Nostalgia plays a huge role in society,
not just in the media we consume
but in the products we buy
and, to some extent, how we vote politically.
Nostalgia's so powerful, because it's so personal,
even though we're actually talking
about things everyone's experienced.
One movie or song can mean many things to many people,
from an early childhood memory, to a first date,
to a lost friend, and so on.
Nostalgia's power lies in the way it gives very common,
very public ideas, media and themes
to create a completely personal feeling in each person.
And this is a marketer's dream.
The whole challenge of marketing and advertising
is how you sell your idea to every customer,
without speaking to each one individually.
You need to make the message impactful
but still accessible across a diverse audience.
The movies that La La Land pay homage to
are ones that very few of us saw when they came out.
In Broadway Melody of 1940,
Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell danced
across a starry stage,
which we see brought to life again
by Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone,
in a scene at the Griffith Observatory.
You'd need to be well into your eighties
to remember seeing the original.
Another influence, Singing in the Rain,
came out in 1952.
So the nostalgia La La Land taps into
isn't one of those time periods of the 40s and 50s.
It's the time each of those watched those classic films
or one similar to it.
They allow you to bring your own past to the experience.
There's been a huge boom in nostalgia marketing
over the last few years, as well.
Look at the massive reaction to Pokemon Go,
which has been downloaded almost 700 million times
since its launch.
When Bob Ross' classic show, The Joy of Painting,
was added to Netflix, Adobe reacted quickly
and created a promotional video tutorial series,
where illustrator Chad Cameron dresses
and teaches Adobe Photoshop Sketch as Bob Ross.
Nostalgia creates positive associations,
because we have a tendency to see our youth
in a rose-tinted way.
Your grandma's pancakes weren't really as good
as you think they were,
and a lot of those movies would seem much worse,
if you watched them for the first time today.
But nostalgia isn't all good for brands.
If you get the balance wrong,
you could be in danger of being seen as a passing trend
or simply as being outdated.
The biggest successes, like Pokemon Go and Adobe,
lie in the ability to blend the past
and the future together.
Pokemon was the first big-time game
to use augmented reality,
and Adobe's illustration software shows
how quickly touchscreen sensitivity is improving.
And La La Land, for all its nostalgia,
has a core idea that millennials are all too aware of,
how hard it is to make your break.
Emma Stone's character has basically given up on her dream,
three-quarters of the way through the movie.
Moving home, tired of the constant rejection,
and scraping by on a dead-end job,
that's something a lot of people experience.
Stone and Gosling have enough star power
to attract a big audience,
but the movie had to have a relevant, current theme
that audiences could connect with,
or it would turn from nostalgic to irrelevant.
If you start to look for it,
you'll realize how much nostalgia is being used
to target millennials,
a group who have always been famously difficult
to market to, thanks to growing up in the internet age.
Buzzfeed grew largely through its lists
of 80s and 90s shows, games, foods, and so-on,
giving people a quick fix of childhood memories.
Instagram's early appeal was its filters and square photos,
a clear nod to classic Polaroid cameras.
And it's not just modern brands who are using this tactic.
The industry giants, like McDonald's and Microsoft,
have all run campaigns drenched in fond childhood memories.
So, what are some simple ways
for a business to tap into this technique?
Many established brands have their own past to draw on,
but most companies don't have that luxury.
The key is to be honest.
Think about the things
that inspired you to create the business in the first place.
What were the early seeds that led you down this path?
Once you've found something that fits,
there are many ways you can incorporate it into your brand.
The simplest way will be design, color schemes, and fonts
that immediately create a connection with the past.
For example, if you had a black background
with a hollow yellow font,
I'm pretty sure most people
would have a little Star Wars light flashing
somewhere in their head.
You're not even close to anything copyrighted,
but you've still given people the association.
If you have a physical product,
you can take this design further, of course.
But don't forget the dangers we mentioned before.
A nostalgic theme could quickly become dated,
if it isn't done correctly.
You can then start to build the nostalgia
through content on your site and social media.
There are plenty of phrases and words
that are linked forever with a certain movie or game or era.
You can use these as shorthand,
and your audience will do the rest of the work themselves.
Wanna learn more about business theory and pop culture?
Be sure to like and subscribe
to be notified of our next segment.