Nostalgia

Choclates and Vicks Vaporub are two things I can’t seems to live without. Chocolates – in any form and for obvious reasons. Vicks Vaporub – NOT in any other form! I need to have a small jar with a blue cap and a label that says “VICKS” in dark blue. Why do I need it? Not because I have a runny nose or a cold, its just that the smell reminds me of the time when I was five and my mum used to put it on me every night before going to bed. So today I keep one next to my bedside because the smell of it takes me back to my childhood memories.

The company may not have ever thought about a customer like me, someone who would buy their product not as a remedy for sickness but instead for increasing satisfaction. Very interesting!

Brands today do not focus on this market – it is often over looked because, firstly they do not know that such type of a market exists for their product and secondly even if there is a market it is relatively a small one. But what brands fail to recognize is that if they manage to create a market for people like me, then it maybe a small but an extremely loyal segment that they would create for their brand.

My mum is crazy about Vimto (the raspberry drink)! She claims she loves it, not necessarily because of its irresistible taste, but because she used to have it when she was young. And now when the brand re-launched itself after so many years she can’t seem to have enough of it because it reminds her of the time she used to have it with her school mates.

I appreciate how some brands are capitalizing on this aspect – the nostalgic aspect, where brands are not gaining market share because their satisfying or creating a need; all they’re doing is re-launching themselves exactly how they were in the past, making sure they do not change even a single bit of their famous line of product so as to take their customers back in time…and the hook is that there can’t be a substitute for it – She just would not settle for any other raspberry drink!

Coke followed the same strategy; they did it by re-launching their classic coke in glass bottles with Coca-Cola written in plain white. Pepsi obviously has followed them. Just the other day I was checking out computer games over the internet. I noticed something very interesting. Most new, high-definition games come with a free trial version and if you like the game you can purchase it for a certain price. While surfing I came across SONIC the Hedgehog from SEGA, a game first launched sixteen years ago with low graphics, but it’s a game I used to play when I was young – when I got my first gaming console, every kid had to have it then. Back then I completed that game at least more than twenty times but still last week I ended up paying the highest amount I have paid for an online game recently. I just had to have it. Not because it’s the best game in the world but because I had childhood memories attached to that game. Probably one of the best purchases I made this year!

Do you have a product you loved as a child? Would you want to write to that company and ask them to re-launch it? Or maybe YOU could attain rights to bring it back to market.