Abstract:

Nostalgia has a significant influence on consumption behavior. In previous studies, most researches took nostalgia as an element of advertisements or brands, which meant that the emotion of nostalgia was triggered by nostalgic advertisements or brands. Different from the past researches, this paper took nostalgia as an independent emotion which was not caused by the advertisements or products (termed incidental emotion) and investigated how it affected consumers’ decisions. To be specific, this research studied how nostalgia affects Chinese consumers’ evaluation of domestic and foreign brands through two experiments. The result indicated that nostalgia cannot elevate Chinese consumers’ evaluation of domestic brands, but it can weaken the evaluation of foreign brands by decreasing the consumers’ materialism. Lastly, the author discussed nostalgia strategies for both Chinese and foreign brands learnt from the result.

Key words: Nostalgia, Materialism, Foreign brand, Domestic brand