Advertising and Nostalgia: A study on viewers' nostalgia proneness and ad decoding

While nostalgia has been used for many years in different disciplines, it has been popular in the advertising industry for the past two decades. The nostalgia used as a positive emotional attraction is expected to arouse a sense of buying in the viewer and produce a variety of results, such as commitment to the brand. Within the framework of this research, nostalgia has been accepted as an advertising appeal and it has been aimed to study how advertisements are coded and what meanings are produced by viewers with different nostalgic proneness. The research was carried out in semi-structured interviews with thirty people, using the mixed method. The Nostalgic Proneness Scale was applied to the participants prior to the interviews. As a result of the study, people with low nostalgia proneness were not found. The study examined how people with medium and high nostalgia proneness decode the ads. However, people with high nostalgia proneness have a different view of the past. As a result, it has been observed that people with high nostalgia proneness have positive responses to the messages emphasizing social memory. As the level of the nostalgia proneness increased, it is observed that the meanings produced from the advertisements are also positive. Although the dimensions of the nostalgia proneness of the participants are close to each other, it is determined that personal, virtual, and cultural nostalgia are more prominent than interpersonal nostalgia.