Nostalgia and Marketing

Vinyl records were supposed to fade away. We’ve had cassettes, CDs, MP3s and now everything just streams from the cloud.

But vinyl sales have grown 10 to 15% every year for the last decade. Sales are 16X what they were 12 years back. And these numbers are only tracking official music store sales, not the possibly much larger second-hand market.
New record players look just like old ones, but connect with bluetooth to your wireless home music system.

Polaroid’s instant camera sales are growing, and Kodak and Fuji both launched new instant cameras this year. Phone cameras are great and all, but some people still want photos that they can hold.

In India, the drink brand Paperboat rocketed to success by offering modern packaged versions of the soft drinks that today’s adults drank as children.

There is little nostalgia in digital products as they come and go so quickly. The marketing challenge for a digital product is to create offline touch-points in the user’s life. Something to remember you by when your code is long retired.