Did You Say [Obscenity] Forget about It?: Examining the Joint Effect of Nostalgia Appeals and Product Types on Receivers’ Purchase Intention Based on Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM)

Abstract This study tested the joint effect of nostalgia appeals and product types on receivers’ purchase intention. The current study also tested the roles of mixed thoughts and mixed emotions as mediators in explicating the processing of nostalgia-themed messages based on heuristic-systematic model (HSM). The results from an online experiment showed that when a public product was promoted, exposure to personal nostalgia-themed advertising led to a higher level of intention to purchase through increased mixed emotions and favorable attitude toward advertising relative to exposure to historical nostalgia-themed advertising. Theoretically, the findings in the currents study are valuable in that the current study empirically examined one of the untested propositions taking rest in the prior literature. That is, the current study opens up a new avenue to examine the effect of nostalgia appeals in the realm of prior literature on advertising message processing. Practically, the findings are contradictory to the stated but untested proposition, which alerts scholars in the academic world and advertisers and marketers in the real world to take into account age-segmented communication strategies for nostalgia-themed strategic messages.