TIM ripesca il 1993. Parmacotto il 1996. Hollywood produce sequel di sequel. Quando un'intera cultura smette di costruire, inizia a riesumare. E lo chiama strategia.
In 2011 Simon Reynolds published Retromania, an analysis of the music industry that became a cultural reference point. His thesis was simple and uncomfortable: there has never been a human society so obsessed with the artefacts of its immediate past, unable to imagine the future. Music had stopped evolving, a phenomenon he linked to the abundance of content and the ease of obtaining it online.
Reynolds was talking about music, but he was describing something we can easily observe today in the advertising produced by Italian companies.
TIM revives a 1993 campaign with Massimo Lopez. Parmacotto remakes a 1996 advert with Christian De Sica. Megan Gale returns for a new phone company. And nobody seems to be asking why this is happening.
Perhaps because it works, so why stop?
And yet one doubt remains: does it really work, or are these companies simply spending value accumulated in the past without building any new value?
The neuroscience of nostalgia, and why the brain falls for it every time
Before judging the companies riding the wave of nostalgia, we need to understand why it works.
Nostalgia is not merely a romantic feeling: it is a psychological and social mechanism rooted in neuroscience. When recalling positive memories, the brain releases dopamine and serotonin. Remembering the good old days is therefore not an innocent act, but an experience that produces real gratification, measurable at a biological level.
This means that an advert featuring a familiar face from the nineties triggers a neurological reward system in the consumer before the message has even been consciously processed. The brain recognises the face, accesses the associated memory and releases dopamine. Critical assessment of the product comes later: and often it never comes at all, because emotion has already done the work.
The mechanism is powerful. And companies know it: even without ever having studied it explicitly, they have learnt it empirically over the years. When you are unsure what to offer, when the market is unstable and creativity is expensive, nostalgia is the solution.
But this solution carries a hidden cost that almost no marketing analysis has the courage to confront.
Why Reynolds understood everything but nobody listened
Reynolds’ thesis in Retromania was that mass nostalgia was the symptom of something structural: the consequence of a highly accelerated era, marked by continuous social, cultural and technological change. One in which the present has become alien.
Technological acceleration has increased exponentially. Economic uncertainty is structural. The pandemic brutally interrupted collective narratives that seemed solid. AI is rewriting the rules of professions that seemed immutable.
When the present is unstable and the future is unreadable, the past becomes the only territory that already has a shared, digested, beloved meaning. It does not need explaining. It does not need building. It already exists, and the brain automatically recognises it as safe.
Companies are therefore responding, more or less consciously, to a real psychological need of their audience.
The problem is that responding to a psychological need with a commercial tactic is not the same as building a brand.
The difference between using nostalgia and hiding in nostalgia
A distinction needs to be made here.
Nostalgia as a creative tool exists and delivers excellent results when it amplifies something that exists in the present. In that case, the past acts as a sounding board for real value.
Nostalgia as a creative substitute, by contrast, produces something entirely different. When a 1993 advert is brought back because nobody knows what to say in 2026, nostalgia replaces value. The implicit message the consumer receives is “we found nothing new to tell you, so we are telling you what you already know”.
Retromania is the result of deliberate choices by companies. They try to attract the widest possible audience by leveraging nostalgia, rather than betting on new products and taking on the risks that come with them.
A hidden cost
Every time a brand leans on the past instead of building in the present, it is spending accumulated brand equity without building new equity. It is like withdrawing from an account without depositing: it works as long as the balance is positive, and becomes a problem precisely when you least expect it.
Leveraging dopamine means activating only the reptilian brain, the most instinctive part, which wants immediate satisfaction. It is a risky strategy because it leads to one-off, occasional sales. Brands’ interest lies in retaining customers and building loyalty through a long-term relationship. With dopamine marketing, you might fool me the first time, but I won’t come back to you.
Nostalgia therefore produces gratification but does not build future preference. It does not tell the consumer why they should choose the brand tomorrow: it deposits nothing into the emotional account that drives future purchasing decisions.
A brand that lives on nostalgia is burning through the work of those who built it in the past, without doing the work required for those who will have to defend it in the future.
What this means for those building brands today
Nostalgia as a defensive response to anxiety about the future is understandable. The present is unstable. The future is unreadable. The past already has a shared meaning that needs no explanation.
But a brand that takes refuge in the past is telling the market something specific, even if it does not mean to: that it has no confidence in its own future. That it does not know what to say in the present. That the only ground on which it feels safe is ground someone else has already conquered.
Positioning is not built on other people’s memories. It is built on your own promises: kept, consistent, repeated over time until they become so recognisable that they need no face from the nineties to be credible.
Nostalgia can amplify a solid brand, but it cannot replace it.
And the difference between the two is precisely the distance between a company that knows where it is going and one that only knows where it has been.
New Connections (FAQ)
Why does nostalgia work so well in marketing, neurologically speaking?
Because it activates the brain’s reward system before the message is consciously processed. Recognising a familiar face or jingle automatically releases dopamine and serotonin, bypassing any critical assessment of the product. The brain does not distinguish between the pleasure of the memory and the pleasure of the product: it associates them. This makes nostalgia one of the most effective tools in the short term, and one of the riskiest in the long term.
What is the difference between using nostalgia and hiding in nostalgia?
The difference lies in the value that exists in the present. Top Gun: Maverick worked because it was a genuinely well-made film, and nostalgia amplified something real. TIM dusting off a 1993 campaign with nothing new to say uses nostalgia as a substitute for value, not as an amplifier. Consumers sense it even when they do not articulate it: the implicit message is that the brand has found nothing new to say.
Every time a brand leans on the past, what is it losing?
It is drawing down brand equity without depositing any new equity. The neurological gratification of nostalgia is immediate, but it does not build future preference: it does not tell consumers why they should choose that brand tomorrow, when there is no longer a familiar face to call upon. A brand that lives on nostalgia burns through the work of those who built it in the past without doing the work needed for those who will have to defend it in the future.
BLISS®
© 2026. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED