In Leif Stromnes’ latest column for B&T, he explains the power of nostalgia and how it can be applied to brands.
In August 2024, Oasis announced its reunion tour with 17 shows in the UK and Ireland. Within hours, millions of fans crashed ticketing websites, desperately trying to secure seats for concerts that wouldn’t happen for another year.
The demand was unprecedented. Tickets originally priced at £75 (AUD $154, at todays rate) were being resold for over £6,500 (AUD $13,337). Incredibly, on September 1, 2024 it was advertised that two nosebleed seats for the 26 July, 2025 concert were available on Viagogo for £23,603 each (AUD $48,434).
Grown adults took sick days from work to sit in online queues. Social media was filled with screenshots of error messages and tales of eight-hour waits that ended in heartbreak. Some users reported having more than one million people ahead of them in the queue, and others reported waiting in a “queue for the queue.”
Due to the unprecedented demand, new concerts were added in Canada, the United States, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Argentina, Chile and Brazil. A tour that was meant to last five weeks was now scheduled to run for five months and in the process set a record for the biggest concert launch of all time.
What makes this frenzy remarkable is that Oasis hasn’t released a single new song since “Falling Down” in 2008. The band imploded spectacularly in 2009 when brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher had their final, career-ending argument backstage before a festival performance in Paris. For nearly twenty years, they’ve been more famous for their feuding than their music.
Yet, 14 million people in the UK and Ireland applied for tickets to see them perform songs they could listen to for free on Spotify.
This phenomenon has a name in psychology: the “reminiscence bump.” It describes our tendency to recall more memories from adolescence and early adulthood than from any other period of our lives. These memories aren’t just more numerous—they’re more emotionally charged and feel more significant to who we are.
For millions of fans, Oasis soundtracked the most formative years of their lives. “Wonderwall” wasn’t just a song; it was the anthem playing when they fell in love, got drunk for the first time, or felt invincible at seventeen. “Don’t Look Back in Anger” became the emotional backdrop to university friendships and late-night conversations about changing the world.
Neuroscientist Dr. Petr Janata discovered that music activates the medial prefrontal cortex, the brain region associated with autobiographical memory and self-referential thinking. When we hear songs from our youth, we don’t just remember the music—we remember who we were when we first heard it.
This explains why Oasis can sell out stadiums without new material. They’re not selling music; they’re selling time travel. It also explains why their 90s hits “Time Flies,” “What’s the Story Morning Glory” and “Definitely Maybe” re-entered the UK charts in August 2024 at numbers three, four and five respectively.
The band understands this intuitively. Its “Live 25” setlists remain virtually unchanged from its 1990s heyday, with only one song from the 2000s.
They know fans don’t want to hear experimental new directions or artistic growth. They want to be transported back to when “Live Forever” felt like a promise rather than wishful thinking.
This emotional time machine is so powerful that it overrides rational decision-making. Fans know the tickets are overpriced. They know the sound quality will be poor in a 90,000-seat stadium. They know Liam’s voice isn’t what it was in 1995. None of that matters.
What they’re buying isn’t a concert—it’s the opportunity to stand in a field with other people who shared the same soundtrack to their youth, singing words they memorised decades ago, feeling briefly like the people they used to be.
The music industry has taken note. Legacy acts now routinely out-earn contemporary artists. The Rolling Stones, despite being in their eighties, command higher ticket prices than most current chart-toppers. Bruce Springsteen’s recent tour grossed more than $380 million, playing songs his audience has heard hundreds of times. And U2’s “The Joshua Tree 30th Anniversary Tour” in 2017 was sold out in more than 50 cities worldwide.
These artists understand that in an age of infinite choice and constant novelty, there’s enormous value in offering something increasingly rare: shared cultural memories.
In addition to music, we’ve witnessed firsthand the power of the reminiscence bump in films and TV with the smash hits “Top Gun Maverick” and “Star Wars Phantom Menace” and the successful reboots of “Sex and the City”, “Frasier” and “That 90s Show”.
But can this phenomenon be applied to brands?
In November 2020, McDonald’s announced the return of the McRib burger with a simple tweet: “the McRib is back 11/2.” Within hours, the tweet had been shared more than 10,000 times, and #McRibIsBack was trending globally on social media.
What made this announcement so remarkable wasn’t the burger itself—a processed pork patty slathered in barbecue sauce on a sesame seed bun—but the fact that McDonald’s had been playing this exact same game for nearly four decades. The McRib first appeared in 1981, disappeared in 1985, then returned sporadically as a “limited time offer” that has driven millions of Americans and Australians into a frenzy of nostalgic consumption.
It’s not like the McRib is the best item on the McDonald’s menu. Food critics have described it as “a boneless rib that isn’t a rib, from an animal that doesn’t have ribs, covered in sauce that isn’t barbecue sauce.” Yet whenever McDonald’s brings it back, sales surge and social media explodes with joy.
The reminiscence bump is such a powerful commercial lever, it even has its own moniker; “nostalgia marketing.”
It has been successfully applied across many product categories, such as motor vehicles, with the successful relaunch of the VW Beetle and Combi Van,
gaming with the return of the Nintendo NES Classic Edition in 2016, and of course, Tourism Australia’s award-winning Crocodile Dundee campaign.
The most successful nostalgia marketing campaigns follow a specific formula; they combine familiar elements from the past with just enough modern updates to feel relevant. Too much change and the nostalgic connection is broken. Too little and the product feels outdated.
The mechanism behind nostalgia marketing is a psychological concept known as “temporal landmarking” specific moments in time that serve as reference points for how we organise our memories. Brands that can attach themselves to these landmarks gain enormous emotional power.
For many Americans and Australians, the McRib isn’t just a burger, it’s a temporal landmark that connects them to the first time they tried it, the friends they shared it with, and the person they were when they were young enough to eat processed pork without guilt.
Because scarcity amplifies nostalgia, McDonald’s never permanently brings back the McRib. If it were always available, it would just be another menu item. But by making it a rare, limited-time experience, McDonald’s transforms an ordinary burger into an emotional event.
Collaborating with classic nostalgia brands and creating bespoke collections is another way of exploiting temporal landmarks.
Vans created a limited edition “Peanuts” range of shoes in 2014, which were cleverly timed to coincide with a resurgence in the popularity of the 1950s cartoon strip. Whilst a limited run was initially envisaged, the range proved so popular that it was extended for a further six months across major retail outlets.
Major milestones also offer opportunities for brands to activate temporal landmarks. For its 100th birthday, Disney created “Decades Collections”, which gave fans the chance to revisit the decade of Disney characters and stories that were most emotionally resonant for them.
The feelings we experience when we reminisce are nostalgia marketing’s killer app. Our brains edit out the negative parts, leaving us with a rose-tinted version of the past that feels more positive than it actually was.
Not only does this make us feel more optimistic about the future, but we’re also more willing to choose familiar brands over alternatives and spend our hard-earned money supporting them.
Oasis understands this and recognised that the opportunity to feel seventeen again—even for £6,500 (AUD $13,337)—is apparently priceless.
