Seeking Stability: Consumer Motivations for Communal Nostalgia

Existing research has examined why consumers are drawn to things from their past (personal nostalgia). However, little empirical work has examined why consumers prefer products that were never a part of their personal history (communal nostalgia). For example, a consumer may purchase vinyl records even though she grew up listening to mp3 files. Here, we find that one reason why consumers may be drawn to communal nostalgia is that it can provide a sense of social stability. Drawing on System Justification Theory (Jost & Banaji, British Journal of Social Psychology, 33, 1994 and 1–27), we demonstrate that perceived threats to the social system increase consumer demand for communal nostalgia and enhance the pleasure consumers get from certain retro products. We further show that a retro product’s ability to provide a sense of stability to consumers mediates the effect of system justification on communal nostalgia. Together, these findings suggest that communal nostalgia may be driven by its own unique motivational antecedents that are distinct from personal nostalgia, as individuals seek to connect to aspects of society that are perceived as stable and unchanging.