The Brand Value of Nostalgia
First Published on LinkedIn on September 20, 2020
I am from Agra. <Yes-yes, insert pagalkhana jokes here>. Having lived in 5 different cities in the last decade, not sure how native to the city I am anymore. Hardly ever returning for more than 10 days since I first left for college, this COVID season, I decided to make full use of WFH and live here for a while. With the blink of an eye, It has been a month now of me tormenting my family with “ssshhh…I am on a con call.”
My first order of business after reaching Agra, was to buy my favourite brand of ice-cream. From the land of Haagen Dazs/Huber & Holly/decadence of the world, I took shelter in the humble hamlet of Madhu Ice Cream. The next few days saw the arrival of bhalle from Bhagat Halwai and dalmoth from Panchi Petha at our house. Nostalgia can be a very heavy emotion. Especially on your wallet.
Like Madhu, Bhagat and Panchi there are innumerable local brands in every city. A Chitale Bandhu in Pune or a Mukhorochak in Kolkata- they all give established national/international brands a run for their money in their respective regions. I wonder, then, why are there so few such brands that develop a larger following apart from in their local diaspora. All the brands I have mentioned in the previous paragraph are more than half-a-century old. It’s a rhetorical question, global failures of local brands have been discussed many times before.
I tried to deep dive into this social psyche through the prism of my own for the love of regional brands. The answer was complex yet can be distilled into a single word- nostalgia. The longing for the past, the simpler times, and the immortal connection that certain brands build up with this emotion can last a lifetime. This is akin to “Mummy ke haath ka khaana”. Objectively speaking the food could be good but for the person longing for it, it is a feast from the heavens. The memory comprehensively blankets all the thrashings one might have received for not eating lauki ki sabzi. As Doug Larson had remarked, “Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.”
No wonder many brands have tapped into this emotion and created products reminiscent of the past esp the ’90s. Makes more sense since almost 40% of India’s population considers this period as their childhood or teen years. Successfully penetrating an audience that has become accustomed to the glitz and glamour of the 21st century but yearns for the occasional breather of an era gone by.
As these thoughts conjured in my mind while I hurriedly walked behind an old gentleman, involuntarily and losing any semblance of acquired civility I uttered- Arre Chachaaa, zara raasta do! Verifying the adage- you can take a UP waala out of UP but never UP out of a UP waala.
