Off Kilter 204: Nostalgia Vs Differentiation.
Beware winning today and losing the future.
Watching from a distance, a distinct separation of strategies was noticeable at the recent Cannes Festival of Creativity. On the one hand, backward-looking nostalgia. On the other, forward-thinking differentiation.
My teen son swears blind that the 90s were the best decade. Not because he has any firsthand experience, but solely because of his love for 90s music and movies, which, unique to his generation, are instantly available at any moment.
He’s far from alone, which is why nostalgia is rapidly becoming a major idea d’jour among marketers targeting that oh-so-desirable “Gen Z” demographic.
As a result, it should come as no surprise that if you were to walk around Cannes over the past month or so, you’d be forgiven for thinking brands no longer had any interest in the future: Lisa Frank notebooks. Tamagotchi cameos. Taglines from 1999. Brand after brand strapping itself to the past, seeking refuge in comfort. Instacart. Mattel. Burger King. Skoda. All treating relevance as if it were a rerun.
The data, of course, supports the move. According to Kantar, nostalgic campaigns increase emotional engagement by 9% and enjoyability by 15%. In a tired world, they offer something close to relief. A quick, cheap laugh. A memory with muscle memory. That sense of this must be good because it used to be.
However, while nostalgia should come as no surprise, let’s contrast it with the differentiation Packy McCormick noted at the very same event.
In his thoroughly-worth-reading-post The Great Differentiation, Cannes was also a parade of brands betting on something riskier. Something sharper. Something new. Liquid Death. Stripe. Tesla. Anduril. Companies building out from belief systems focused resolutely on what makes them unique. Making things you couldn’t have predicted because they weren’t remixes of the past—they were statements of the future.
Two distinct strategies on the same sun-drenched beachfront, yet they couldn’t be further apart.
At the heart of this divide are two fundamentally different bets about the future of the consumer.
Nostalgia brands are fundamentally risk-averse. They are betting that consumers are too burned out for novelty and that the safest path to emotional resonance is one that has already been trodden.
Differentiated brands are fundamentally risk-embracing. They are betting that consumers are starving for friction. That they’re ready—desperate, even—for something weird, sharp, and built from scratch. Something of the future built for the future.
Nostalgia will likely win the immediate round, as it performs better in pre-tests. It’s instantly legible. It’s widely available. It’s easy. It rarely offends. It’s scalable. And, at first glance, it’s very low-risk.
But what it doesn’t do is build the future.
At the heart of all future-forward brands is a joyful optimism. Those who innovate and bring something new do so by sharing their belief in a more joyous future. It’s an emotion that sells, scales, and sticks. But lately, such joy has become a dangerous thing. Not because it’s less effective, but because its aperture has narrowed so profoundly. In uncertain times, riven with polarization over even the most innocuous of topics, unfamiliar joy feels risky. It’s unpredictable. It might bomb. It might confuse. It might not translate. It might create a backlash.
So, like any risk-averse operator, the industry found a workaround: joy, but only if it’s first made safe by conforming to patterns we’ve seen before.
Which is what nostalgia provides. It’s secondhand joy. Sanitized. Pre-cleared by memory. And that makes it safe. Unfortunately, it also makes it boring.
Here’s the danger: if you only look to the past to make people smile, you eventually forget how to create anything new. Your emotional vocabulary degrades. Your brand becomes predictably narrow and unsurprising. And over time, you train your organization to stop innovating and looking forward, because the best-performing stuff is behind you.
This is when sentimentality becomes decay.
Of course, it’s not strictly binary. Nostalgia isn’t solely a comfortable short-term tactic, with differentiation its uncomfortable long-term cousin.
A few brands have managed to walk the tightrope—using nostalgia as a gateway to a more interesting future, rather than a trap that locks them to the past.
LEGO could have coasted on dad-core kits and nostalgia-fueled adult fandom. Instead, it released movies, launched robotics kits, partnered aggressively, and embraced storytelling IP, reframing itself as a brand of future-facing creativity. If nostalgia was the doorway, innovation was the house.
Equally, The Barbie Movie didn’t just lean into retro—it detonated it. It turned a plastic doll into an existential lens. The pink was loud, yes—but the societal critique was sharper. It didn’t just remind you of the brand. It reintroduced it.
These brands didn’t treat memory as the product. They treated it as the emotional on-ramp to something freshly built.
Contrast this with Gap. A brand that keeps trying to revive the ‘90s but cannot articulate why anyone should care. No new belief system. No sharp edges. Just logo tweaks and emotional muscle memory. Or RadioShack, whose 2023 viral reboot leaned on ironic Gen Z nostalgia but collapsed under the weight of its irrelevance. When there’s nothing structurally different underneath, winks to the past wear off fast.
If we’re not careful, nostalgia traps us in what we might call a sentimentality loop—a comfort-led marketing model that quietly declares: “We have no vision for the future and no idea how to surprise you anymore. So instead, we’ll remind you of a time that used to.”
However, in a world where someone else is always willing to take that riskier bet on the future you’re desperate to avoid, such an attitude can be fatal. In simple terms, the longer you avoid the unfamiliar reality of tomorrow by reveling in the joys of the past, the more vulnerable you will become to competitors who don’t think that way.
Because here’s the thing: optimistic joy for a future that doesn’t yet exist has the edge. It creates brand codes others find hard to mimic. It becomes a form of differentiation so deep it touches product, culture, and company design.
This isn’t just brand as an aesthetic skin. These are brands as belief systems.
Which means that while nostalgia might buy you time, differentiation builds your future. And the brands that confuse one for the other are likely sleepwalking toward irrelevance, no matter how delightful the vintage packaging may at first appear.
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agreed there is a lot of nostalgia driving branding/identity work now, but i think there is more to it than just going back to a warm safe space. i think one reason something like Burger King hits well for people and especially "throwback" identity and uniforms in sports (equally as hot) is because of their differentiation and boldness.
what we see in those nostalgic brands is something beyond "looking old" or nostalgic but being easily identifiable and visually representing something far more interesting than 21st century design trends. i think the Gen-Z connection to past decades is also evidence that there is something deeper going on. its not a longing for a better time they experienced, its an appreciation of something of better quality (especially in regards to music and movies). there would be no reason to look back if the present were satisfying. and in regards to those brands like Burger King or sports team throwbacks, we might be finding that what a lot of people consider a "nostalgic trend" is actually the building blocks of a distinctive, long lasting brand.
yes differentiation benefits long term, but that doesn't mean brands haven't gone off track somewhere. they needed to look back to go forward. to embrace what makes them memorable and likable and different, then build on that.
Thanks; this is an excellent post. Yet there's a back-and-forth dynamic at play here: our positive visions of the future—the fuel for our differentiation—are formed by what we've experienced in the past; conversely our nostalgia is often fueled by a fear of the future.
Jazz gives us one cultural model for creating new visions out of an appreciation of the past that avoids nostalgia.