Sell Me the Old, Old Story: Retromarketing Management and the Art ...

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themselves. More significant than the raw marketing materials is the accompanying managerial mindset. This involves an appreciation that brands are co-created. They are a collaboration between marketer and consumer. Consumers have a stake in the retromarketing process. They grew up with the brands, invested them with meaning, and wove stories of personal development around these mass-produced yet indelibly individual totems. They will work with marketers bent on bringing brands back from the dead. But they won’t be pushed around, or dictated to, nor will they accept anything that fails the “authenticity” test. Retro brands operate within the parameters that managers impose and consumers permit. As the Quisp case indicates, the narrative structure of that meaning-seeking process can become a common quest of managers and consumer, or a quarrel between them. Successful retromarketing management involves the creation of consumer comfort stops along the much-traveled route to the really real. Conclusion In a recent anthology, Hooking Up, the best-selling author Tom Wolfe makes a series of predictions about the 21 st century. 28 Whereas the 20 th century was characterized by its emphasis on progress, on amelioration, on making it new, the 21 st century, he maintains, will be an era of regression, of deterioration, of making it old. Sated, sybaritic, self- satisfied consumers, Wolfe suggests, 29 will “sink ever deeper into their Neo-Louis bergères, idly twirling information about on the Internet, killing time like Victorian maidens doing their crocheting, knitting, tatting, needlepoint, and quilting, content in what will be known as the Somnolent Century or the Twentieth Century’s Hangover.”
Less than a year after Wolfe’s words of wisdom, the Somnolent Century was given a rude and cruel awakening. Nevertheless the retrospective propensity he identified prior to September 11, remains as potent as ever, possibly more so. Such is the ubiquity of retromarketing these days that it is difficult to think of an unaffected product category. Retro restaurants, retro refrigerators, retro telephones, retro T-shirts, retro T-Birds, retro locomotives, retro lawnmowers, retro motor bikes, retro pogo sticks, retro sports equipment, retro garden furniture, retro wrist watches, retro writing instruments, retro computer games, retro cookery books, retro coffeepots, retro cosmetics, retro candies, retro comics, retro colas, retro cigarillos, retro casinos, retro cruise liners, retro roller coasters…the list is endless. This article has examined the recent rapid rise of retromarketing and concluded that it represents consumers’ search for authenticity in an increasingly inauthentic world, a search for the comforting certainties of childhood. This is a search that is likely to become more important in years to come, as the population of the western world inexorably ages. It is a search that astute marketers can exploit, provided they understand the demographic drivers and operative principles. Retromarketing is not merely a matter of reviving dormant brands and foisting them on soft-heated, dewy-eyed, nostalgia- stricken consumers. It involves working with consumers to co-create an oasis of authenticity for tired and thirsty travelers through the desert of mass-produced marketing dreck. As the prominent postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard judiciously notes, 30 “when the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.”
Page 1 and 2: Sell Me the Old, Old Story: Retroma
Page 3 and 4: Introduction Sell Me the Old, Old S
Page 5 and 6: principles and practice of marketin
Page 7 and 8: Be that as it may, one doesn’t ne
Page 9 and 10: The available evidence, then, indic
Page 11 and 12: monogamists voted in the thousands,
Page 13 and 14: ostensibly identical brands and pos
Page 15 and 16: contention. One of the most strikin
Page 17 and 18: sidewalks and headstones to shoppin
Page 19: • Iconicity is central to the bra
Page 23 and 24: Spring of 2001. In total, several t
Page 25 and 26: 16. See for example: Robert V. Kozi

Sell Me the Old, Old Story: Retromarketing Management and the Art ...

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