I’m in my early forties, and I grew up in the ’80s. I still feel an emotional connection to the music, movies, video games, design and the particular atmosphere of that era. For me, much of it has become more than just pop culture.

I remember my first Game Boy and my first Nintendo. I remember the four-player adapter that suddenly meant it wasn’t just one person sitting in front of the TV anymore, but four people playing together. By today’s standards, the technology was modest. Back then, it felt as if an entirely new world was opening up.

Today, I collect vinyl, record mixtapes for my friends, rewatch old movies and still get excited when I hear music that takes me straight back to another time, even when it turns up in an ad. I enjoy retro-inspired fashion, have a soft spot for vintage action figures and go to see Duran Duran having my youth come alive all over again.
And then there’s 80s cinema. Films like Back to the Future have become iconic for a reason. The DeLorean, the music, the whole atmosphere – they still have the power to take me right back. I recently bought the LEGO DeLorean and spent a wonderfully nostalgic Sunday putting it together. It’s funny how something you first experienced decades ago can still bring you that much joy.

What’s interesting is that it’s not really about the old stuff itself. It’s about the feelings and memories it brings back. A particular song can recreate an atmosphere within seconds, one I thought I had long forgotten. An old video game can bring back memories of an afternoon spent playing with friends in front of the television on a rainy day. Sometimes, all it takes is a sound, a typeface or a particular colour to transport me mentally to another time.

Of course, I know the ’80s weren’t better in every respect. I’m not looking to return to the technology of that era, nor do I want to romanticise everything about life back then. And yet, there is something about that period that still means a great deal to me.

And I’m certainly not alone.

Nostalgia is not some niche interest reserved for people who refuse to let go of their old gaming consoles. It has become a recurring theme across the music industry, film, fashion, gaming and, increasingly, brand communication. Classic franchises are being revived, past decades provide the creative blueprint for new products, and songs released decades ago suddenly become cultural phenomena all over again. Companies are even bringing back products such as the Walkman, albeit through brands other than Sony.

What I find particularly interesting is this question. Why can memories of past cultural experiences have such a powerful emotional impact, and how can brands use that emotional connection to make people care about their products, services and experiences today?

There is solid academic research exploring precisely this question.

The Persuasion Knowledge Model, developed by Friestad and Wright in 1994, describes how consumers recognise the persuasive intentions behind commercial messages. Once they realise that an advertisement is trying to influence them, they may become more critical of its message and the brand behind it. This is where music comes into play.

In three experiments involving 372 participants, Strick and colleagues found in 2015 that emotionally moving music draws viewers more deeply into an advertisement's story and reduces critical processing. In one of the experiments, it also reduced the extent to which participants perceived the advertiser's intentions as manipulative. This, in turn, increased their behavioural intentions.

Music can also activate something even more personal. Janata, Tomic and Rakowski found in 2007 that 30% of the song presentations in their study triggered autobiographical memories, often accompanied by strong and predominantly positive emotions. This means that familiar music can bring personal experiences and the feelings associated with them into an advertising context.

Taken together, these findings suggest an interesting mechanism. Nostalgia, especially music, can activate memories and emotions that already exist, while emotionally moving music can draw consumers into an advertisement's story and reduce their focus on its persuasive intentions. Rather than confronting the audience primarily with a commercial message, brands can create an emotional experience that makes people less inclined to process that message critically.

1. What is Nostalgia and how does it affect us?

Nostalgia is more than simply remembering something from the past. It is an emotional experience that connects autobiographical memories with our sense of identity and the feelings associated with important moments in our lives. A 2022 review by Yang and colleagues, published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, identifies four interconnected processes involved in nostalgia. These include autobiographical memory, self-reflection, emotional regulation and reward processing. The researchers highlight the hippocampus, which plays a central role in memory, as well as several regions associated with the brain's reward system. Nostalgia essentially brings back not only a memory, but also some of the emotional meaning attached to it.

There is also a fascinating reason why the music, games and cultural references of our youth can remain so powerful decades later. A systematic review by Munawar, Kuhn and Haque, published in 2018, examined 68 quantitative studies on autobiographical memory. Their findings confirmed a phenomenon known as the reminiscence bump. People in middle and later adulthood tend to recall a particularly high number of personal memories from the ages of approximately 10 to 30. This is also the period in which many of our formative cultural experiences take place and our personal identities begin to take shape.

A 2026 study by Ballou, Bowman, Hakman and Przybylski provides particularly interesting real-world evidence of this phenomenon. The researchers analysed more than 13,000 hours of actual gaming activity from 1,099 Nintendo Switch users. They found that the proportion of gaming time spent on retro titles increased with age until around 40. While 20-year-olds devoted less than 2% of their gaming time to retro games, the figure was approximately 8% among 40-year-olds. Players were particularly likely to revisit consoles that had been popular when they were between five and 13 years old.

Music shows a similar cultural connection. According to the German Music Industry Association's Music Industry in Numbers 2025 report, music from the 1980s and 1990s remained the second most popular genre among every age group over 40. The report also found that 42% of people aged 40 to 49 were willing to spend money on music, making them the most commercially engaged age group in this respect.

Taken together, these findings show that nostalgia is not just about looking back fondly. It is connected to how we remember our lives, how our cultural identity develops and the way we choose to spend our leisure time and money decades later.

2. When a Game Becomes a Place You Miss - World of Warcraft Forever

Some video games become more than entertainment. They become cultural landmarks that connect different generations. World of Warcraft is one of them.

Launched in November 2004, the game had already attracted more than five million subscribers worldwide by the end of 2005. In October 2010, that number had grown to more than 12 million. Few games had managed to build a virtual world on such a scale, or become such a significant part of their players' lives.

I first experienced World of Warcraft in its beta in 2005. And when I recently started seeing the advertising for World of Warcraft Forever, I was genuinely surprised by the approach Blizzard had chosen. The game launched in Europe on November 5, 2026, at midnight CET.

What struck me most was how different the campaign felt from what we have come to expect from major video game releases. When contemporary action games advertise themselves, they usually show fast cars, gunfights, explosions, spectacular graphics and constant action. The objective is to demonstrate scale, speed and technical ambition. The World of Warcraft campaign takes an entirely different route. Many of its content pieces are remarkably quiet. They linger on familiar landscapes, recognisable locations and atmospheric scenes from the game. The music and pacing allow these moments to breathe. Rather than selling spectacle, the campaign evokes the feeling of being back in a world that was once part of your everyday life.

And that feeling is very specific. Staying up late into the night, spending hours exploring an enormous open world, talking to friends over TeamSpeak or another voice chat application, and gradually becoming part of a group of players who take on adventures together. Each person has a different character and a different role. You complete quests, enter dungeons together, fight increasingly difficult bosses and hope to find that one particularly rare epic item. These were not simply gaming sessions. For many people, they became shared experiences and friendships that extended far beyond the game itself.

After years of requests from the community, Blizzard is now bringing back the original continents of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, together with many of the familiar locations that made the original game so memorable.

The old world, its locations, its characters and its music are already established creative assets. But their value goes far beyond the original production effort. Each familiar landscape can represent hundreds of hours of play, old friendships, late nights and experiences that players have carried with them for two decades.

I would not describe Forever as simply bringing back an old game. Blizzard is developing a permanent offering alongside modern World of Warcraft and WoW Classic, with new stories, some additional content and ongoing updates. But the marketing advantage is obvious. It does not have to create the emotional foundations of the product again. It can build on something that is already deeply embedded in the audience's memory.

And perhaps that is the most interesting part of the entire campaign. Blizzard is not just bringing back a game. It is giving people access to a world they once loved and inviting them to experience it again. Because sometimes, the strongest reason to try something new is the opportunity to fall in love with something you already know.

3. What We Miss Is Everything That Came With It

Of course, this approach cannot be applied to every brand or product. Nostalgia has a particular advantage when a brand has been part of people's lives for a long time, when its products have accompanied entire generations or when they are connected to shared cultural experiences. This is especially true for evergreen products that have accumulated personal memories and meaning over decades. Simply adding a retro typeface or bringing back an old logo will not create that connection.

Volkswagen demonstrated this with its #MeinGolf campaign for the Golf's 50th anniversary. The brand invited owners to share personal photographs and memories connected to their cars, turning those stories into campaign content. According to campaign partner Intermate, the initiative generated 77.6 million impressions. Rather than simply celebrating the model's history, Volkswagen made the memories of its customers part of the campaign.

You could almost call this nostalgia bait. The term is commonly used to describe the commercial use of familiar memories and cultural references through revivals, reboots and references to the past. But there is an important distinction between simply using nostalgia to attract attention and giving people a meaningful reason to reconnect with something they once loved. The Volkswagen example shows how a brand can turn personal memories into participation rather than relying exclusively on its own advertising.

And this phenomenon extends far beyond gaming and automotive brands. Take vinyl records, for example. According to the German Music Industry Association, revenue from vinyl sales in Germany more than doubled between 2016 and 2025, reaching around 152 million euros. The format has become a meaningful part of the contemporary music market again, decades after CDs and digital music seemed to have made it obsolete.

These examples point towards something bigger than a simple preference for old products. We may not necessarily want to return to the technology of our childhood, but we seem to miss some of the experiences and feelings associated with it. The tangible nature of a vinyl record, the ritual of making a mixtape or the shared experience of spending an entire evening exploring a virtual world with friends.

And that is perhaps the most important lesson for brands. Nostalgia is not necessarily about selling people something they already own or once loved. It is about understanding what they associate with it. The product is often just the starting point. The real emotional value lies in the memories, relationships and experiences built around it.

The opportunity for brands is to bring those associations into the present, give them a new context and create new experiences around something people already feel connected to. In that sense, nostalgia is not simply a way of looking back. It can be a remarkably effective way of making something old feel relevant again.