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Introduction
Experiential marketing has received a great deal of attention in marketing research. The approach emphasizes important elements of advertising that are indirectly related to product characteristics (e.g. atmosphere, associated emotions, cognitive reasoning). That is, it goes beyond consideration of functions or attributes of the product itself. The five major components of experiential marketing are: sense, feel, think, act, and relate (Schmitt, 2000). Each factor reflects issues relating to how consumers perceive, consume, and experience products. Grounded in this experiential marketing approach, nostalgia marketing stimulates consumer's senses by encouraging them to travel back to a past time in their life, and thereby to feel nostalgia. Sense and feeling components are, thus, highly related to nostalgia marketing. The senses (i.e. taste, smell, sight, sound, and touch) permit consumers to relive certain past times, and elicit feelings of nostalgia. For example, when a person eats familiar, comfort, food, watches old movies, listens to old music, or visit cities or areas where they used to live, nostalgic feelings are often aroused. The desire to "go back in time" can be fulfilled through nostalgic consumption of products that spur sensations and recollection of their personal past. The key to nostalgia marketing is to allow consumers to mentally return to the experience of the favorable past, eliciting positive emotions by exposure either to the product itself (e.g. old fashion restaurants such as a 1950s diner, vintage car designs), or a nostalgic marketing message (e.g. nostalgic promotion). Nostalgic advertising clearly fits within the experiential marketing framework, connect the evoked positive sensations and emotions of one's past to the advertised brands.
Nostalgia also permits individuals to travel back, connecting who they are today to who they were in the past, connecting to a positive view of their younger self. The relationship between self-identity and consumer behavior (Sirgy, 1982) has been a critical topic in consumer behavior research. People consume in ways that are consistent with their self-identity. Consuming products is considered a way to express one's self, create self-identify (Belk, 1988; McCracken, 1989), and manage identity threats (White et al. , 2012; Ward and Broniarczyk, 2011). Considering that nostalgia is induced by the personal past, it is closely linked with self-continuity. Psychologists have defined self-continuity as maintaining identity congruency (i.e....