Nostalgia for early experience as a determinant of consumer preferences

Studies of music, motion pictures, movie stars, and fashion products have shown that styles popular during a consumer's youth can influence the consumer's lifelong preferences. The authors present an integrative model of this phenomenon and propose that these nostalgic effects are not limited to products that relate to the arts and entertainment or are primarily aesthetic. As an illustrative example, the authors investigate the effects of early experience on consumer preferences for automobile styles. Consistent with expectations, they find that men do but women do not show evidence of nostalgic attachment to the styles experienced in their youth—that is, their preferences peaked for products that were popular when they were young. Also, as expected, individual differences in the psychographic variable of nostalgia proneness play a role in moderating these effects. These findings expand the understanding of the generality, the boundaries, and the managerial relevance of the age-related peak-preference phenomenon. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

[1]  Morris B. Holbrook,et al.  Nostalgia and Consumption Preferences: Some Emerging Patterns of Consumer Tastes , 1993 .

[2]  D. Buss,et al.  Preferences in human mate selection. , 1986 .

[3]  Victor Konrad,et al.  Scaling Dispositions toward the Past , 1980 .

[4]  Joseph O. Rentz,et al.  Forecasting the Effects of an Aging Population on Product Consumption: An Age-Period-Cohort Framework , 1991 .

[5]  Z. Luria,et al.  SORTING GENDER OUT IN A CHILDREN'S MUSEUM , 1991 .

[6]  E. Walster,et al.  Importance of physical attractiveness in dating behavior. , 1966, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[7]  Kenneth D. Bahn,et al.  Developmental Recognition of Consumption Symbolism , 1982 .

[8]  Frances K. McSweeney,et al.  Classical Conditioning of Preferences for Stimuli , 1985 .

[9]  M. Holbrook,et al.  Some Exploratory Findings on the Development of Musical Tastes , 1989 .

[10]  J. Farrow,et al.  Risk for DWI: A New Look at Gender Differences in Drinking and Driving Influences, Experiences, and Attitudes among New Adolescent Drivers , 1990, Health education quarterly.

[11]  M. Holbrook,et al.  Age, Sex, and Attitude toward the past as Predictors of Consumers’ Aesthetic Tastes for Cultural Products , 1994 .

[12]  M. Holbrook,et al.  Market segmentation based on age and attitude toward the past: Concepts, methods, and findings concerning nostalgic influences on customer tastes , 1996 .

[13]  J. Walker Smith,et al.  Rocking the Ages: The Yankelovich Report on Generational Marketing , 1997 .

[14]  Robert M. Schindler,et al.  Critical periods in the development of men's and women's tastes in personal appearance , 1993 .

[15]  G. Davies,et al.  Recognition memory for automobiles: A developmental study , 1993 .

[16]  C. M. Schaninger,et al.  A Conceptual and Empirical Comparison of Alternative Household Life Cycle Models , 1993 .

[17]  M. Bornstein.  Sensitive periods in development: structural characteristics and causal interpretations. , 1989, Psychological bulletin.

[18]  George E. McKechnie.  The Environmental Response Inventory in Application , 1977 .

[19]  Fred D. Davis,et al.  Yearning for yesterday : a sociology of nostalgia , 1980 .

[20]  Peter H. Bloch,et al.  The leisure experience and consumer products: an investigation of underlying satisfactions. , 1984 .

[21]  M. Seligman.  On the generality of the laws of learning , 1970 .