{"id":6889,"date":"2018-01-19T16:33:11","date_gmt":"2018-01-20T00:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wou.edu\/westernjournal\/?p=6889"},"modified":"2018-01-19T16:33:11","modified_gmt":"2018-01-20T00:33:11","slug":"the-nostalgia-factor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/the-nostalgia-factor\/","title":{"rendered":"The nostalgia factor"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_6890\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-6890\" style=\"width: 1024px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernjournal\/files\/2018\/01\/Neopets-1024x512.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"512\" class=\"size-large wp-image-6890\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-6890\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">neopets.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Zo<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00eb<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Strickland | Editor-in-Chief<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The other night, I stayed up for three hours playing games to earn points on \u201cNeopets.\u201d Don\u2019t get me wrong, I love Neopia as much as the next childhood-reminiscent 21-year-old, but shouldn\u2019t I spend my time doing something else? The short answer is: yes. Ideally, I wouldn\u2019t spend three hours trying to feed my Neopet enough food to satisfy ten years of neglect.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">However, the games <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u2014<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> identical to how they were when I played them in elementary school <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u2014 <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">sucked me in.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I wasn\u2019t lured in by amazing graphics or complicated tasks. What got me instead was the familiarity of all of my old Neopian haunts. I stayed for the nostalgia, not the neopoints. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nostalgia is powerful. It kickstarts games like \u201c<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Pok\u00e9mon Go<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201d and allows us to justify paying $35 for a 12-pack of Surge. Though there are no real numbers tracking the effectiveness of nostalgia marketing, it has relatively no competition when it comes to being an effective marketing tool. After all, most products that you connected to in your youth were already marketed to you at one point. You\u2019ve already formed bonds and associations with them.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Using nostalgia to market products works because it taps into our emotions. If you have positive childhood experiences with Lisa Frank folders in elementary school, you\u2019re probably more likely to be drawn to the makeup brushes that are reminiscent of Frank\u2019s designs. Humans are naturally drawn to things that we believe will result in positive experiences, so it makes sense for us to subconsciously <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u2014 <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">or consciously <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u2014<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> emulate the youthful feeling we get when we use games or products from our childhood.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nostalgia marketing works because we romanticize the past as a way of coping with the future. It\u2019s easier to take a break from homework to play \u201cNeopets\u201d than it is to take a break and read the news.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Contact the author at zstrickland14@wou.edu<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Zo\u00eb Strickland | Editor-in-Chief The other night, I stayed up for three hours playing games to earn points on \u201cNeopets.\u201d Don\u2019t get me wrong, I love Neopia as much as the next childhood-reminiscent 21-year-old, but shouldn\u2019t I spend my time doing something else? The short answer is: yes. Ideally, I wouldn\u2019t spend three hours trying [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1030,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1030"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}