노스탤지어가 제품 평가에 미치는 영향: 인지욕구의 조절효과

Recent consumer preferences’ pattern trend indicates that nostalgia marketing has been widely used in tourism, hotel, food, culture etc. as well as drama or movies. From this perspective, previous research studies show the positive impact of product strategy emphasizing nostalgia on the consumers’ evaluation. Namely, consumers evaluate more positively on the product reflecting nostalgia even though it is the same product creating warmth feelings. However, nostalgia impacts are not universal. We hypothesize that nostalgia impacts are moderated by the cognitive needs and use experiments to examine the hypothesis.
Experimental results show that there was no nostalgia effect in the product evaluation for high cognitive consumers. However, nostalgia effects are existed for low needs for cognition consumers. That is, low needs for cognition consumers evaluate more positively product with nostalgia than product without nostalgia. The higher cognitive needs emphasize thinking sides than feeling sides. In the sense that thinking is more closely related to the cognitive resources, recent economic recession creates exhaustion of cognitive aspects. This study verifies that recent economic situation is somewhat related to the resurgence of old traditional nostalgia products.