Nostalgiacising: A Performative Theory of Nostalgic Consumption

Nostalgia—commonly conceptualized as a longing for the past—plays an important role in shaping contemporary consumer behavior and market offerings (e.g., Belk, Ger, and Askegaard 2003; Brown, Kozinets, and Sherry 2003; Thompson and Tian 2008). However, purely retrospective nostalgia is difficult to frame in relation to marketing as a discipline, which is overall future-oriented by focusing on “unrealized potentialities” among consumers and ways to translate them into “personal needs and desires” (Zwick and Cayla 2011, 7) through branding, advertising, and other marketing mechanisms. This conceptual paper aims to establish a performative theory of nostalgic consumption, which we term nostalgiacising. We define nostalgiacising as reflective (future-oriented) consumer nostalgia that is not innate or an emotion, but rather performatively enacted through five specific dimensions. Extant marketing and consumer research typically theorize that nostalgic consumption and consumers’ memory work, while occurring in the present, are retrospective in nature, and therefore inherently about the past. In contrast to this dominant view, we bridge Butler’s (1990) conceptualization of performativity with the age of crisis concept and Boym’s (2008) notion of reflective nostalgia to theorize how contemporary individuals are increasingly engaging in a performative consumption of nostalgia not to relive or remember a bygone past, but rather to playfully reflect on or reenact possible futures during a present time