The Fleecing of the Alternative Nation

By Traci Vogel, Metro Santa Cruz. Posted September 12, 2003.

What, in the name of all that is good about America, were Mary Lou Retton, Mr. T, George Hamilton, and Loni Anderson doing on my television in a commercial for something called Sizzle & Stir?

This is where it all began: the questions, the searching, the gnawing doubts. It was bad enough when John Travolta's career lurched back into zombie reanimation, but watching Mr. T hawk a packaged dinner mix just brought the terrible truth of it all home:

My childhood was becoming marketing fodder.

Sweat-Shopping to the Oldies IF THERE is a spiritual center to the new commodification of nostalgia, it is the clothing, furniture and knickknack chain store Urban Outfitters. Packed with colorful merchandise, the stores draw high school and college students alongside nostalgic Gen-Xers. On one recent visit, a high school-age couple played the arcade game Ms. Pac Man, which stood next to an old Centipede arcade game. On a display table behind them, a pair of '80s-era Air Jordan reproduction tennis shoes sported the surprisingly reasonable price tag of $80. A T-shirt emblazoned with the Atari logo was neatly folded beside them. It was worth wondering: Would the young couple playing Ms. Pac Man be able to contextualize these two cultural artifacts? At Urban Outfitters, you can purchase a reproduction of the original Atari game system -- a box, joystick and big-pixel games like Pong and Asteroids -- for $32. Or you can plunk down for a Eames-style dining table and chairs just like the ones seen on That '70s Show -- which is a nice example of legislated nostalgia -- for just $1,500. Urban Outfitters excels in making nostalgia for pseudobohemian cool. The franchise's founder, Richard Hayne (also CEO of the Anthropologie stores), opened the first store in Philadelphia in 1975. Last year, in the midst of a retail free fall that crushed even giants like K-Mart, the store posted an 83 percent increase in profits and opened 13 new outlets. But as Jonathan Valania of the Philadelphia Weekly reported recently, "While the typical Urban Outfitters shopper is likely to be liberal-minded ... the fiftysomething Hayne is mom-and-apple-pie conservative. He and his wife, Margaret, have contributed $13,150 to the campaign coffers of Paleolithic right-wing Republican Sen. Rick Santorum and his Political Action Committee over the years." Not only that, but most of Urban Outfitters' nostalgic fare is produced in sweatshops located in Turkey, India or Sri Lanka.

Sure, for Baby Boomers the experience is nothing novel. The Beatles, hippie culture and even a resurrected Martin Luther King Jr. have cameo'd in advertisements for everything from antihistamines to life insurance. It's all part of what public relations firms call nostalgia marketing. The premise is simple: Link a product to a person, era or song that evokes a simpler, happier time, and the good feelings those things prompt will attach to the product itself.

Not old enough to have a memory associated with hippie culture? No problem. The commercial, with a soundtrack, a few strokes of atmosphere and a minuscule story line, creates what Douglas Coupland termed "legislated nostalgia" -- defined by online dictionary Word Spy as "nostalgic images or ideas presented in such a way that even people who weren't yet born seem to 'remember' that time."

Nostalgia marketing and legislated nostalgia are such potent marketing techniques that they're being used by everyone from politicians to McDonald's with increasing frequency. The tactic is especially effective during difficult economic or socially stressful times. After all, as Business Week noted in a cover story about "The Nostalgia Boom," "Social experts say much of the appeal of nostalgia stems from a longing for a return to simpler times."

Well, as third-graders everywhere would say, "Duh." Nostalgia marketing isn't exactly subtle. It tugs at the basest emotional nerve center: happy memories of childhood. It's no surprise that images of '50s and '60s culture worked on the Baby Boomers: they're a sentimental generation, anyway. Generations X and Y, on the other hand, are supposedly so disinterested, disaffected and hard to pin down that the only label suitable for us is a nonlabel. We're used to advertising's games. We're pop-culturally world-weary. Nostalgia couldn't possibly work on us, right?

Wrong, says Peter Johnson, strategic account manager at 3 Marketeers Advertising in San Jose. And you don't have to look very far for proof: "I would only go to the very popular television programming on some of the music channels; one, for example, being I Love the '80s ," Johnson says. "I haven't seen the Nielsens, but I know that show is incredibly popular with people our age [Gen-Xers]."

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