Marketing the past: a literature review and future directions for researching retro, heritage, nostalgia, and vintage

ABSTRACT

Over the last decades, marketing literature has persistently been interested in how marketers and consumers alike engage with the past through past-themed brands, products, and services. However, our knowledge on past-themed marketing is scattered and treated in largely separated literature streams on retro, heritage, nostalgia, and vintage. This article reviews marketing literature on retro, heritage, nostalgia, and vintage – and their ontological, methodological, and axiological underpinnings – to synthesise a differential overview of these streams and contribute shared future research directions for researching and understanding past-themed marketing. Thus, based on our review, we identify and discuss areas for future research on marketing the past, specifically concerned with authenticity complexities and marketing management perspectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Past-themed
• retro
• heritage
• nostalgia
• vintage

Introduction

The past has become a hallmark of contemporary marketing and consumption. Brands like Coca-Cola are known for their past-themed advertising and retro imagery, which evoke feelings of nostalgia and connection to the past. Levi’s have rebranded their vintage 501 jeans to appeal to a new generation of consumers while still emphasising their past; luxury watchmaker Rolex uses links to its past to create a sense of tradition and authenticity in its marketing campaigns; Harley-Davidson has used its long history and association with rebelliousness and independence to create a strong brand image; and nostalgia music playlists frequently outperform new music, and heritage artists top the iTunes charts.

Because marketers and consumers alike press rewind across various markets, the past has been a recurrent analytical subtext in various marketing literatures over the last decades. If anything, the power of the past has been hailed as a panacea for marketing (Brown, 2007, 2013, 2015, 2018). Marketers use the past to design their brands and products, animate marketing campaigns, create and cater to nostalgic consumers, and fashion enchantment. For consumers, past-themed market offerings that push a retro, heritage, nostalgia, or vintage button offer a way to travel back in time, valorise brands as special, find amusement, indulge in memories, create identities, but also to make sense of the present and future.

However, our conceptual knowledge of the past in the marketing literature is scattered across separate streams of research. Thus, what remains surprisingly absent from the substantial body of research interested in the past from a marketing perspective is a comprehensive overview, and discussion of the various ways in which the past has been approached. In short, while literature on retro, heritage, nostalgia, and vintage has gained a substantial foothold in the marketing field, we lack a differential understanding and discussion of these literatures that address the past to better understand marketing. For example, Hartmann and Brunk (2019) simply suggest using the term ‘past-themed’ to refer to brands and marketing activities that in one way or the other use the past, thereby de-emphasising potentially useful nuances between retro, heritage, nostalgia, and vintage. Balmer and Burghausen (2018) offer a range of helpful suggestions on how the past could be understood in a marketing context, but they have not fully addressed the wide range of conceptualisations of the past, their underlying assumptions, and implicit value propositions in extant research. Brown (1999) offers a typology of the various kinds of retro and repro brands, but he de-emphasises relevant perspectives on the past beyond the level of brands.

The purpose of this article is to review extant marketing literature on retro, heritage, nostalgia, and vintage. The emphasis on these concepts is grounded in an inductive pre-phase of our scoping review procedure revealing these four concepts as the most commonly used ideas pertaining to the past within a marketing context. Hence, these central concepts inform our scoping review process which we detail below. We analyse and discuss the underlying ontological, methodological, and axiological dimensions of how these four largely separate research streams portray how marketers and consumers utilise the past. That is, we interrogate prior marketing literature concerned with the past by asking ‘what is the past?’ (ontological dimension), ‘how has the past been studied?’ (methodological dimension), and ‘what kinds of value are created by the past in marketing and consumption?’ (axiological dimension). We then use this reviewing framework to point to white spots on the research map and derive a common ground of these seemingly diverse literatures for a shared future research agenda paying closer attention to 1) marketing authenticity with a past; and 2) marketing management.

Review procedures

We follow a scoping review procedure (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005; Fowler & Thomas, 2023; Rumrill et al., 2010) to study the various ways in which the past has been approached in the marketing literature. The general aim of a scoping review is to get a broad understanding of the existing literature, synthesise it, and identify conceptual links and research gaps. We do this by mapping four key concepts – retro, heritage, nostalgia, and vintage – across their ontological, methodological, and axiological underpinnings. These four concepts have been identified as re-occurring concepts through an inductive pre-phase to our literature review. This inductive pre-phase consisted of immersion into the literature through snowballing. This led to the more structured phase of our scoping review, where we utilise a five-stage process framework (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005; Rumrill et al., 2010). Specifically, we 1) developed a research question; 2) identified relevant studies; 3) selected studies; 4) charted the material; and 5) analysed, interpreted, and integrated the material and reported the findings.

In stage 1, we developed the research question. Concretely we ask: How is the past understood and utilised in existing marketing literature? This question shall be answered by interrogating the four different streams across their ontological, methodological, and axiological underpinnings. In stage 2, we identified the potentially relevant studies through the help of online databases. In line with previous research, we focused our search on three databases: Business Source Premier, Scopus, and Web of Science (Jørgensen & Knudsen, 2022). For the Web of Science, we limited our search to business studies, as it would otherwise yield more than 100,000 papers. We used ‘marketing’ as the main keyword, while combining it with either ‘nostalgia’, ‘retro’, ‘heritage’, or ‘vintage’. We included papers in English published from 1983 onwards and included two books as these constitute seminal contributions in studying the past in marketing (Brown, 1995; McCracken, 1990). We followed recommendations by Arksey and O’Malley (2005, p. 24), who argue that ‘It is important that key journals are hand-searched to identify articles that have been missed in database and reference list searches’, and added important studies (Balmer, 2013; Brown, 1999; Curasi et al., 2004; Hakala et al., 2011; Hartmann & Ostberg, 2013; Sørensen et al., 2021; Turunen & Leipämaa-Leskinen, 2015). We noticed that papers from Advances in Consumer Research were not included in the databases, hence, we included those we found most relevant from our pre-phase. In total, our search yielded 2224 papers. Out of these, 13 were added manually based on our inductive pre-phase.

In stage 3, we initiated the process of identifying and removing irrelevant papers. We also applied the selection criterion of publication in journals ranked in the Academic Journal Guide by the Chartered Association of Business Schools. We then read through the abstracts of all remaining papers to determine their suitability for our research question. This resulted in 1897 papers being removed. An additional 127 papers were removed as duplicates, leaving a final list of 200 papers plus the 2 before-mentioned books (see supplementary material). In stage 4, we gathered basic information about each paper and charted the material (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005), which is visualised in a graph and in a table (see Appendix). Finally, in stage 5, we analysed, interpreted, and integrated the material by applying our ontology-methodology-axiology framework.

Literature review

Overview

The past is commonly understood as ‘the period before and until, but not including, the present time’ (Cambridge Dictionary, 2023), or as ‘time gone by; something that happened or was done in the past’ (Merriam-Webster, 2023). For marketing scholars, the past as such offers important insights into marketing and consumption phenomena by historicising them through looking in the rear-view mirror (Beverland et al., 2020; Brown et al., 2001; Crockett, 2017; Ertimur & Coskuner-Balli, 2015; Karababa & Ger, 2011). In this article, however, we wish to focus on how the past is evident in the marketing literature besides historicising.

While the prime interest for marketing scholars may not be the past as such, they are dealing with the past when studying present-day marketing and consumption phenomena that are about: i) retro, aspiring to elucidate how re-launched historical brands combine old and new; ii) heritage, looking to understand how and why the past of brands can serve as a meaningful asset for companies; iii) nostalgia, aiming to understand how the past permeates consumer culture, here understood as the ‘ideological infrastructure that undergirds what and how people consume and [which] sets the ground rules for marketers’ branding activities’ (Holt, 2002, p. 80); and iv) vintage, yielding insights into how and why marketers can engage with consumers’ valorisation of objects from the past. Table 1 offers an overview of such past-themed marketing and consumption (see also Appendix). While there is a broad array of marketing literature that deals with the past from an individual consumer perspective (nostalgia, vintage), brand-centric perspective (retro, heritage) and a consumer cultural perspective (nostalgia, retro), a differential cross-examination of their inherent ontological, methodological, and axiological dimensions is currently lacking in extant marketing literature. Thus, based on our differential review, we aim to contribute to the development of future research directions by cross-pollinating hitherto separated literature streams.

Table 1. Overview.

	Retro	Heritage	Nostalgia	Vintage
Ontology	Retro marketing is about promulgating a combination of old and new brand elements.	Corporations can use and leverage their heritage and brand history for marketing purposes.	Nostalgia is a bittersweet emotion experienced on the individual level and a market-mediated ideological infrastructure negotiating collective memory.	Vintage denotes curated objects from a bygone era.
Methodology	Is predominantly studied qualitatively through brand-level representations including interviews, netnography, autobiographical essays, and document analysis.	Is predominantly studied qualitatively through corporate management actors and brand-level representations.	Is studied either quantitatively through generalisations of simulated pastness (psychological perspective), or qualitatively by contextual immersion in pastness (socio-cultural perspective).	Is predominantly studied qualitatively by elucidating consumers’ relations to object biographies through ethnography, but also occasionally through quantitative methods.
Axiology	Value outcomes on authenticity and brand meanings.	Value outcomes on authenticity, brand equity, and trust.	Value outcomes on authenticity, enchantment, and myths.	Value outcomes on authenticity, cultural capital, status, and uniqueness.

Retro

Ontology

Ever since Brown’s (1999, p. 365) first observation of the pervasive boom of retro marketing, promising consumers ‘yesterday’s tomorrows, today!’ and a later influential article on retro branding (Brown et al., 2003), retro marketing has steadily risen as a field of interest for marketing scholars (Ahlberg et al., 2021; Brown, 2013, 2018; Cattaneo & Guerini, 2012; Dogerlioglu-Demir et al., 2017). Following Brown et al. (2003, p. 20), we understand retro marketing as those activities related to the marketing of retro brands conceptualised as re-launched historical brands ‘usually but not always updated to contemporary standards of performance, functioning, or taste’. In contrast to the marketing of nostalgia-framed products, services, and brands (see below), retro marketing sets itself apart by this updating (Brown et al., 2003). The juxtaposition of old and new and consequently the integration of a temporal paradox between past and present are key features of retro marketing.

The juxtaposition of old and new is interesting because retro marketing references both past and present, which can act as a salve for consumers’ threatened social roles and alienation in the present condition (Brown et al., 2003; Hemetsberger et al., 2011). For some consumers, this perceived turmoil can become so powerful that they omit the future completely and instead resort solely to a spectral version of the past (Ahlberg et al., 2021). With the present often being characterised by an escalating acceleration (Husemann & Eckhardt, 2019), retro marketing responds to consumers’ quest for comfort in the past they know. Thus, retro marketing can momentarily reassure consumers by sending them back to an imagined space of moral certainty and romance while at the same time fostering feelings of uniqueness, newness, and exclusivity (Brown et al., 2003).

Methodology

Research on retro marketing obtains knowledge mainly by examining the brand-level of markets (Brown et al., 2003; Cattaneo & Guerini, 2012). This includes any related actors in the retro brand universe. Qualitatively this has been done through interviews, netnography, autobiographical essays, and document analysis (Brown et al., 2003; Hartmann & Ostberg, 2013; Hemetsberger et al., 2011). In some cases, pictures were used to elicit memories about certain consumption goods, which further helped to ‘stimulate narratives and reveal meaning structures’ (Hemetsberger et al., 2011, p. 244). This also summarises how the qualitative side of the research aims to obtain an ideographic understanding of meanings. While Cattaneo and Guerini (2012, p. 685) observe that most studies on retro ‘are of a qualitative nature’, there is also research approaching the retro phenomenon from a quantitative perspective. These techniques include survey data and experiments (Cattaneo & Guerini, 2012; Dogerlioglu-Demir et al., 2017).

Axiology

Retro marketing creates value by enchanting consumers with a blend of then and now and, through this, by facilitating an ability to stabilise tensions inherent in the relationship between past and present (Brown et al., 2003) as well as societal tensions (Brunk et al., 2018; Hartmann & Ostberg, 2013; Hemetsberger et al., 2011). Retro marketing can have this effect because it is able to connect an imagined past space of moral stability to the present (Brown et al., 2003).

From the literature, we discern that retro marketing efforts can be simulated. The updating process which retro brands undergo can be met with scepticism and the questioning of authenticity when consumers are faced with a brand-new old brand that is not the same as its former self but a simulated version of the past original (Hartmann & Ostberg, 2013). Thus, retro marketing operates within an authenticity contradiction wherein consumers feel that the present is inauthentic (Brown et al., 2003) while the authenticity of retro brands is also challenged. Yet retro marketing has successfully been permeating various industries and markets for decades. This popularity stems from marketers managing to create a simulated past that facilitates the creation of value by referencing a past that consumers find comforting. Marketers sanitise and idealise a past condition, re-package old market offerings, and tailor mythologies to animate stories of the past that, in turn, deliver the promise of a commodified authenticity (Ahlberg et al., 2021; Brown et al., 2003). In other words, retro marketing creates brands that have a fabricated authenticating market value of history (Brown et al., 2003; Hartmann & Ostberg, 2013).

Heritage

Ontology

Marketing and branding activities can foreground a brand’s trajectory over time or a corporation’s past, origin, and heritage. Such heritage marketing can serve marketers as a fundamental way to create a meaningful bond with consumers. In the literature, heritage has become a prevalent concept, particularly within branding contexts (Balmer, 2011; Brunninge, 2023; Iglesias et al., 2020; Urde et al., 2007; Wiedmann et al., 2011). Brand heritage can be defined as ‘a composite concept incorporating the history of the brand in numbers of years of operation and the power of the brand story over time, as well as the consistency and continuity of the core values, the product brands and the visual symbols’ (Hakala et al., 2011, p. 454). In heritage marketing, it is beneficial for a brand to cherish its history but it also needs to nurture that history to ensure the longevity of its heritage (Pecot et al., 2022). However, heritage is not purely related to a brand’s historical trajectory, but has been described as omni-temporal, bridging a brand’s past, present, and future (Balmer & Burghausen, 2015a, 2015b; Burghausen, 2023; Mir Bernal et al., 2023), which squarely points to the strategic usefulness of heritage for marketing and branding activities.

Next to heritage branding, there is also the branch of corporate heritage marketing (Balmer & Burghausen, 2015a, 2019). This adjacent concept covers the wide-ranging corporate activities that revolve around the company’s heritage. Corporate heritage marketing is defined as ‘an organisational-wide philosophy which is underpinned by a multi-generational focussed, customer, stakeholder, societal and CSR/ethical focussed ethos. It is enacted and created over successive generations and should broadly meet a tri-generational criterion’ (Balmer, 2013, p. 315). This definition is a testament to the omni-temporal nature of corporate heritage marketing, as it coalesces the past, present, and future (Balmer & Burghausen, 2019). Balmer (2013) details how corporate heritage marketing consists of a total of eight dimensions, namely character, communications, covenant, conceptualisations, culture, constituencies, custodianship, and context. Taken together, these dimensions constitute the marketing mix for corporate heritage marketing (Balmer, 2013).

Authenticity plays a central role in heritage branding literature. As Balmer (2011) argues, authenticity is a necessary precept for any heritage brand to succeed. This idea is further substantiated by Rindell and Santos (2021) study on what makes a heritage brand authentic for consumers. They find that uniqueness, credibility, and consistency are key dimensions in the authenticity assessment of heritage brands. It is also clear that within heritage brand studies, the past is understood as being untouched, which allows consumers to re-visit past times authentically (Dion & Borraz, 2015; Dion & Mazzalovo, 2016; Urde et al., 2007). However, none of these studies address why consumers care about the authenticity of heritage brands in the first place.

While heritage can serve as a great asset for brands, it can also be a liability. A strong heritage can make consumers unwilling to accept any changes to the original (Han et al., 2021). By making changes to a brand, marketers can disrupt the transhistorical connection that consumers feel. In turn, consumers no longer feel that the heritage brand moves them. The authentic connection with the brand, which serves as a gateway to accessing the past, has been ruptured. Consequently, brand managers need to be attentive to how they engage with the past. This is as heritage brand management requires managers to uncover and activate the history of a brand (Iglesias et al., 2020; Lee & Davies, 2021), in some cases changing or even inventing a past (Brunninge, 2023; Brunninge & Hartmann, 2019), which can become problematic from moral and ethical points of view.

Methodology

Extant research uses predominantly qualitative methodologies to study heritage in a marketing context (Burghausen & Balmer, 2014; Dion & Mazzalovo, 2016; Lee & Davies, 2021; Urde & Greyser, 2015; Urde et al., 2007). Such explorative qualitative research explicitly aims at theory-building (Urde et al., 2007). This means that an ambition to measure and quantify heritage and its effects ‘remains largely unaddressed’ (Rose et al., 2016, p. 936), but could generate new insights into what degree heritage brands’ augmented identity is salient (Balmer & Chen, 2017) or to what degree heritage is a driver in marketing management (Wiedmann et al., 2011).

We can observe that there is a tendency in this research stream to obtain knowledge predominantly by utilising a marketing management perspective and a corresponding collection of empirical material through inquiry with managers (Burghausen & Balmer, 2014; Dion & Borraz, 2015; Dion & Mazzalovo, 2016; Spielmann et al., 2021; Urde & Greyser, 2015; Urde et al., 2007). From a critical perspective, this deemphasises consumer insights and reveals the epistemological assumption that managers’ statements are to be preferred over consumers’. This somewhat problematic assumption is rooted in the idea that when researching heritage, managers are the experts on a brand’s past and can still ensure varied viewpoints, as interviews with managers can focus on the diversity of product categories, for example, something that is more difficult for consumers to contextualise (Dion & Mazzalovo, 2016). Hence, Rindell et al. (2015) advocate for gathering consumer data to understand consumer perceptions of a heritage brand. While some research on heritage is conceptual and/or based on desktop research (Balmer, 2011), there are also valuable examples of case study research that combine multiple data sources such as document analysis, participant observation, media reporting, and brand communication; all complementing each other, offering different perspectives and, thus, facilitating deeper insights by triangulation (Brunninge, 2023).

Axiology

Heritage creates value by impacting several key marketing variables positively and has the potential to create a competitive advantage (Hudson, 2011). The dominant value-based argument is thus, that it is important to manage brand heritage (Balmer & Burghausen, 2019; Iglesias et al., 2020; Lee & Davies, 2021) and nurture the ‘institutional identity traits, which have remained meaningful and invariant over the passage of time’ (Balmer, 2011, p. 1385). While heritage marketing literature currently has a clear conceptual focus on the managerial side (Butcher & Pecot, 2022; Rindell et al., 2015), it is likely that value could be generated by looking into what mechanisms attract consumers.

Heritage is beneficial for increasing the perceived brand quality (Pecot et al., 2018), as a source for authenticity (Brunninge & Hartmann, 2019), and for ensuring trust that leads to increased purchasing intentions (Rose et al., 2016). While such research shows that heritage marketing can create value, we can gain deeper insights into how value is created by investigating instances where heritage branding goes wrong. One example is Han et al. (2021) study that shows how drawing on heritage might backfire when trying to innovate the product. Here, the challenge for the brand is to remain authentic to its consumer base while modifying the brand. Further, Sørensen et al. (2021) explicate how a heritage brand’s symbolism becomes misaligned with societal currents, turning the brand heritage from asset to liability. They argue that the altered cultural terrain has implications because ‘the myths from which it once garnered cultural power gradually lose their potency’ (Sørensen et al., 2021, p. 201). This means that the mobilised mythology no longer resonates with society. Another example is a study by Mencarelli et al. (2020) which shows how consumers can be reluctant to accept the way in which brands tap into a given heritage for sheer commercial benefit. By looking specifically at brand museums, they showcase how consumers can be vexed by heritage that has been materialised. One example of this is the materialisation of advertising materials into art objects where the ‘commercial nature of these elements can lead visitors to question their legitimacy as heritage artefacts’ (Mencarelli et al., 2020, p. 42). Looking at these failed or unfavourable instances of heritage management reveals that value is not something that emerges organically from the heritage itself. Instead, the argument inherent in the literature is that heritage needs to be activated and managed to create value, for example by creating an authentic aura of heritage.

Nostalgia

Ontology

Marketing and branding activities can frame a market offering in terms of a wistful, bittersweet, sentimental, often romanticised yearning for a return to some past period or condition, i.e. nostalgia. In that sense, nostalgia can be understood as a symptom of the desire of both marketers and consumers to engage in a meaningful relationship with a specific aspect of the past world. The literature describes this relationship in two ways. First, psychology-based literature conceptualises nostalgia as an emotion (Holak & Havlena, 1998; Lasaleta et al., 2014; Zhou et al., 2013). From this perspective, nostalgia is defined as ‘a longing for the past, a yearning for yesterday, or a fondness for possessions and activities associated with days of yore’ (Holbrook, 1993, p. 245). Second, consumer cultural literature portrays nostalgia as a multi-modal phenomenon that is shaped by collective memory and can be created, fashioned, and mobilised as a market-mediated cultural resource (Brunk et al., 2018; Cantone et al., 2020; Hartmann & Brunk, 2019; Higson, 2014).

Both conceptualisations of nostalgia – as emotion and cultural resource – point to a meaningful engagement with a past condition that no longer exists. It is this engaged relationship, experienced as nostalgia, that serves as an interpretive resource for guiding consumers on how to ideologically navigate the present (Belk, 1990, 1991; Cantone et al., 2020; Holak, 2014). Literature dramatises how consumers experience nostalgia during troubled times (Cantone et al., 2020; Hartmann & Brunk, 2019; Hemetsberger et al., 2011) and both streams of nostalgia literature identify alienation or discomfort with the present as a trigger for consumer nostalgia. This is seen, for example, when consumers are met with challenges in their life situation like discontinuity, recovery from grief, and loneliness (Merchant et al., 2011).

Marketers play an important role in translating this alienation into nostalgia by creating market offerings and fashioning nostalgia-framed marketing campaigns that render the past into a consumable nostalgia-framed resource (Brunk et al., 2018). Hence, nostalgia is at least partly created and mediated in and by markets. While the creation of the consumable past by marketers builds on experienced consumer alienation (Brunk et al., 2018), nostalgia-framed markets might also create experienced alienation. In other words, nostalgia can be based on personal memories and experiences with the past (Holak & Havlena, 1992; Lambert-Pandraud & Laurent, 2010; Muehling & Pascal, 2011), but can also be based on historical epochs and collective and simulated nostalgia of which the subjects have no direct experience (Brunk et al., 2018; Hemetsberger et al., 2011; Holak et al., 2007; Merchant & Rose, 2013; Muehling & Pascal, 2011; Stern, 1992). In the psychology-based literature, nostalgia is cognitive, and consumers therefore act based on a prior experience imprinted in their minds (Holbrook & Schindler, 1996). which can be retrieved through nostalgic appeals (Schindler & Holbrook, 2003).

Consumer cultural literature on the other hand emphasises how nostalgia operates not purely via individual memory, but also via collective, or popular memory whereby nostalgia-framed brands, products, and services become an important resource for negotiating tensions in popular memory by creating specific versions of the past (Brunk et al., 2018; Hartmann & Brunk, 2019). Through this, nostalgia is continuously being produced (Brunk et al., 2018) rather than pre-existing in consumers’ minds. It therefore is not necessarily an inherent and inert quality of consumers that marketers can exploit by activating nostalgic appeals to trigger favourable responses, as portrayed. Rather, the socio-cultural perspective on nostalgia highlights how nostalgia itself can be co-created in a market by a variety of cultural actors (Brunk et al., 2018).

Methodology

When zooming in on how researchers have studied nostalgia, it becomes evident that there is a methodological divide between the psychological and the consumer cultural domains. The psychological perspective on nostalgia obtains knowledge primarily by quantifying nostalgia. Whether it is by experiments (Lasaleta et al., 2014; Muehling & Pascal, 2011, 2012), surveys (Davari et al., 2017; Heinberg et al., 2020; Holbrook, 1993), by ranking nostalgic pictures (Schindler & Holbrook, 2003), or written accounts (Holak & Havlena, 1998), there is a conception that individual consumer nostalgia, as well as its roots, conditions, and effects can be measured, quantified, and generalised. These generalisations offer the opportunity to create scales of nostalgia proneness and serve as a tool to advance our knowledge on to what degree consumers are nostalgic about certain consumer goods (Holbrook, 1993; Sierra & McQuitty, 2007). By conducting experiments, researchers are not studying individual nostalgia as it occurs and is played out in consumers’ life worlds but are approximating it by re-creating nostalgia. This is typically achieved by evoking respondents with fabricated nostalgia, which then elicits a reaction.

The consumer cultural perspective on nostalgia obtains knowledge primarily by studying nostalgia qualitatively in various contexts, using interviews, consumer introspections, historical archival material, and netnographic inquiries, exploring not only the meaning of nostalgia from a consumer perspective, but also ‘the macrosocial facets and cultural roles of nostalgia against the backdrop of historical, political and cultural trajectories’ (Hartmann & Brunk, 2014, p. 258). Previous research that has focused on the macrosocial level provides insights into how nostalgia influences consumers on a societal level (Brunk et al., 2018; Havlena & Holak, 1996). This approach helps to shed light on how nostalgic meanings are unstable and change in parallel with societal shifts, which further underpins the necessity of contextualising research (Cantone et al., 2020). These societal shifts are identified by tracing the historical links within a particular consumer culture, thereby assisting in providing an overview of the contextual structures that shape consumers’ understanding of nostalgia. Thus, the socio-cultural take on nostalgia is seeking to derive contextualised meanings and understandings (Maclaran & Brown, 2001), rather than producing generalisations, which renders interpretivism as a prominent epistemology within this perspective.

Axiology

While the marketing literature on nostalgia has been ever increasing, attention to nostalgia in terms of value creation has been relatively scarce. Literature suggests that nostalgia creates value by functioning as a salve for anxiety about the future (Cantone et al., 2020; Stern, 1992), as an inducer for charitable donations (Merchant et al., 2011), and as a source for enchantment (Hartmann & Brunk, 2019; Hartmann & Ostberg, 2013).

Nostalgia-framed products from the past are often perceived as being more authentic than contemporary counterparts (Belk, 1991; Brown, 1995; Södergren, 2022). This is also why consumers seek nostalgic products when experiencing authenticity threats (Cantone et al., 2020). One important argument here is that since consumption and advertising have spread into all parts of social life in most Western consumer societies, they have altered our relationship with the world (Belk, 1991; Brown, 1995; Hietanen et al., 2020). Hence, the way in which we see the world, including nostalgia-framed brands and products will be understood through a marketised logic, or what Thompson and Kumar (2022) call a market logic of conscious capitalism. It is this reflexive relationship to nostalgia that enables consumers to resolve authenticity threats in the present by consuming nostalgia-framed products.

Another value-creating process is mythologisation. As it is, at least hitherto, impossible to travel back in time, consumers experience a mythological version of the past through past-themed consumption (Hartmann & Brunk, 2019; Roberts, 2014; Södergren, 2022; Stern, 1992). In this mythologised past, consumers face tensions between the past and present, and it is precisely the negotiation of these tensions that can create value. For example, Södergren (2022) analyses the Viking myth and how it builds on ideas no longer ideologically aligned with the present, requiring interpretive work from consumers to resolve the tension by erasing unwanted parts of the past. To summarise, nostalgia creates value by offering marketers and consumers a mythology-infused frame to draw on the past in their quest to resolve tensions in the present.

Vintage

Ontology

In contrast to nostalgia marketing, which frames a market offering in terms of a wistful, bittersweet, sentimental, often romanticised yearning for a return to the past, vintage marketing is about marketing vintage objects such as second-hand clothing, old steel bikes, typewriters, cars, or other memorabilia. Thus, vintage does not necessarily involve a nostalgic frame, but can help consumers to create meaning through engagement with objects from the past, i.e. vintage objects. For example, consumers can gravitate towards vintage bikes, gather around vintage cars and boats, or collect vintage guitars, microphones, and vinyl records. While extant literature deemphasises the marketing dimensions pertinent to markets that are organised around vintage objects, it focuses more squarely on the consumption of vintage objects. Here, vintage objects are commonly understood as objects from a specific bygone era that often had a previous owner (Abdelrahman et al., 2020; Duffy et al., 2012; Sarial-Abi et al., 2017; Turunen & Leipämaa-Leskinen, 2015).

In our review, we note that the literature addresses vintage primarily as an inherent quality of an object that has factual or indexical relations to the past. That is, existing literature tends to de-emphasise the iconic and symbolic relations that objects can have with the past as being vintage. This ontological imbalance is somewhat surprising from a marketing perspective, given that we can observe marketing practitioners using vintage as a label to market their mass-produced new products, for example Fender’s American Vintage Series electric guitars or Levi’s vintage collection. From the ontological perspective of existing literature on vintage, these objects would technically not be considered vintage objects from the dominant etic perspective. However, marketers do use vintage as a label in their marketing efforts to augment their offerings that are, from the perspective of extant literature, not considered vintage.

Thus, from a marketing perspective, vintage stands out from the other terms. Literature on heritage, retro, and nostalgia clearly acknowledges marketing work as a vital part in the ontology, rendering elements of the past into marketable heritage, retro brands, and consumable nostalgia. Here, heritage, retro, and nostalgia are used as symbolic frames in marketing and branding activities. Yet, for vintage, this relationship to marketing constitutes an ontological gap vis-à-vis the other literature streams. Rather than looking at the role of marketing and branding activities in the creation of vintage, the dominant view in vintage literature is that for vintage products the meanings are already inherent in the object, as the meanings have been accumulated from past owners into a unique object biography (Abdelrahman et al., 2020). Here, patina can be a desired quality, as it serves as a mechanism to validate the authenticity of the object and its history (McCracken, 1990). Therefore, the job of marketers is rather to curate those meanings by highlighting certain meanings that would be particularly attractive to an audience in today’s market. For example, in the market for vintage bicycles, marketers could highlight how the vintage steel bikes are true to cycling’s romantic ethos of sensing the bike and having knowledge about how to fix a bike. This is just one example of how various vintage markets are growing. As these markets seem to become more important, it is necessary for marketers to consider how to forefront the intended meanings to attract even broader audiences. This is because vintage products for some will be perceived as old garbage, while they can also be perceived as unique consumption items (Turunen & Leipämaa-Leskinen, 2015). It is the marketers’ job to facilitate the meaning conversion as well as redirecting it towards the right market.

As for the process of how vintage products acquire uniqueness, Curasi et al. (2004) found that vintage objects contain an inalienable wealth that creates a social cohesiveness. Drawing on Weiner (1985), they explain how objects with a circulation history ensure continued value creation in the object and how consumers achieve a sense of immortality by living on through their past objects. The inalienable wealth created thereby serves as a future-oriented practice to ensure that owners become part of an object’s cultural biography. In that sense, the vintage object serves as a guiding beacon in navigating the past, present, and the future. Therefore, the multitemporal combination of symbolic values has implications for how vintage objects become meaningful because the vintage object creates an indexical link with both past owners and the past itself. Weiner (1985, p. 210) explains how an object of inalienable wealth ‘acts as a vehicle for bringing past time into the present’ with its sacred and mythological meanings. Likewise, the vintage object is materialising a direct lineage to the past.

Methodology

Research on vintage uses both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Qualitative research stresses the importance of gaining an insider view of how vintage consumption is performed, perceived, and understood among consumers. Researchers therefore typically embark on longer ethnographic field visits, which provide them with the opportunity of experiencing vintage consumption from the inside (Abdelrahman et al., 2020; Duffy et al., 2012). This enables researchers not only to observe vintage consumers in a naturalistic setting, but also to participate and thereby get a deeper understanding of the dynamics of vintage consumption (Abdelrahman et al., 2020). Such an ethnographic approach also involves interviews within vintage communities exploring how consumers valorise vintage objects. Following Duffy et al. (2012, p. 521), this is helpful to ‘gain an emic perspective of vintage behaviours and practices through their stories and descriptions of their own and others behaviour’. Thus, qualitative methodologies such as ethnographies are used to gain an emic understanding of various vintage phenomena.

By contrast, quantitative methodologies are more geared towards an etic perspective, aiming to measure vintage phenomena (Cervellon et al., 2012; Sarial-Abi et al., 2017). For example, past research measures the main motivations for indulging in vintage consumption (Cervellon et al., 2012). In some cases, a multi-study program of enquiry aims to increase reliability of the findings (Sarial-Abi et al., 2017).

Axiology

Overall, how vintage creates value can be understood in two ways. On the one hand, due to their uniqueness, vintage objects and their consumption can lead to fetishisation. This uniqueness is achieved through the retrieval of a past cultural condition that no longer exists (Sarial-Abi et al., 2017). However, consumers may feel that they can relive this past cultural condition through the consumption of vintage objects. Since the exact conditions of a bygone point in time cannot be recreated, we are often dealing with a fetishised and idealised version of the past that is constructed. It can be considered a fetishisation due to its sole objective of creating an intrinsic gain, thereby disregarding previous owners’ attachment to the object (Amatulli et al., 2018; Cervellon et al., 2012; Turunen & Leipämaa-Leskinen, 2015). Thus, when vintage objects are valorised and consumed solely for being unique, the value transpiring from purchasing and owning vintage objects becomes an illusion fabricated by marketers and is reduced to a mythologised sales slogan to lure consumers in need of a self-confidence boost from owning a rare object from the past (Amatulli et al., 2018).

However, on the other hand, vintage marketing may also be understood as a source of value, when we consider the specialness of vintage objects not as an essential quality but as achieved by a continued and collective effort by multiple owners and sellers to imbue the vintage object with meanings. From this perspective, vintage marketing and markets emerge as time warp-like oases, because it is the collective effort of preserving and caring for the vintage objects that gives them meaning and, ultimately, value (Abdelrahman et al., 2020; Turunen & Leipämaa-Leskinen, 2015). The relationship between the consumer and the vintage object, mediated by marketing and market practices, gains importance over the essentialist argument of a vintage object being special as such. This is evident in the way in which the desirability of vintage objects relies on previously transforming the object and making it more desirable. At the same time, vintage objects can act on their consumers, because ownership of vintage objects can have important identity-laden effects (Amatulli et al., 2018; Cervellon et al., 2012).

Because of the ontological gap we outlined above, extant literature on vintage does not yet address how vintage can be used as symbolic frame in marketing and branding activities. This implies that little is known about how vintage creates value for marketers and consumers when used predominantly as part of a marketing arsenal rather than referring to an object of the past. This opens the way for future research directions which we discuss next.

Discussion of future research directions

Based on our literature review along the axes of ontology, methodology, and axiology, we discuss two areas for future research on marketing and the past. These concern two main issues: i) marketing authenticity with a past and ii) marketing management. These future research opportunities emerge from our immersion into the different literatures and their ontological, methodological, and axiological underpinnings. From the review, we discern that these two issues represent recurring themes that are sometimes more, sometimes less explicit across the literatures and therefore offer fruitful future research directions and opportunities for cross-pollination.

Marketing authenticity with a past

Marketers are often concerned with rendering their offerings authentic – that is, creating a sense of ‘genuine’ and ‘real’ – and as our literature review suggests, they often turn to the past to do so. Authenticity is a complex but vital issue not only for relaunched brands from the past, where it is not untypical to deal with consumer scepticism (Hartmann & Brunk, 2019; Hartmann & Ostberg, 2013), but also for other products, brands, and services that use, exert, and dwell on the past.

While the question of whether a past-themed market offering is genuine, real, and legitimate (i.e. is this brand authentic?), a sense of authenticity can be induced by marketers and consumers. However, if pushed and forced too hard, such authentication efforts can backfire and become the antithesis of authenticity (Hartmann & Ostberg, 2013; Hietanen et al., 2020). Across the literature we reviewed, a common denominator is that the past is an arena for inducing an aura of authenticity into market offerings, and for valorising the authenticity from a consumer perspective.

What becomes clear from the literature is that authenticity is seemingly involved in the promulgation of consumer value when using the past in and for marketing purposes. Thus, authenticity features prominently across literature on retro (Ahlberg et al., 2021; Brown et al., 2003; Hartmann & Ostberg, 2013), heritage (Brunninge & Hartmann, 2019; Han et al., 2021), nostalgia (Hamilton & Wagner, 2014; Heinberg et al., 2020; Södergren, 2022), and vintage (Amatulli et al., 2018; Turunen & Leipämaa-Leskinen, 2015). However, there are several conceptual and empirical blind spots when it comes to the relation between marketing the past and authenticity that render fruitful avenues for future research.

First, future research on past-themed marketing may direct more focused attention on authenticity contradictions. Following the idea that marketing itself may be perceived as an inauthentic practice itself (Nunes et al., 2021), Thompson and Kumar (2022, p. 24) propose ‘that authenticity is not a set of discrete properties that distinguish the genuine from the fake – but, rather, an ongoing process of managing a network of contingent relationships. In some markets, for some brands and enterprises, these contingencies may be more stable, whereas in others, they may become more culturally contested and, thus, unstable’. We know relatively little about how the various forms of past-themed marketing we have elucidated in our review may be understood in terms of managing such contingent relationships; and whether these contingencies may be more stable or unstable, respectively, in past-themed markets. The idea of a marketised past goes hand in hand with the idea that consumers can reflexively be aware of the marketised nature of the past, not falling for naive ideas of an authentic past fully absent of commercial interest when it comes to past-themed products, brands, and services. Thus, building on Thompson and Kumar’s (2022) authenticity contradictions, we suggest that future research on past-themed marketing explores the authenticity contradictions inherent in past-themed markets and embraces authentication not purely as a process that renders something as ‘authentic’, but also as a process that renders something as ‘not inauthentic’.

Second, future research might explore and detail the specific types of authenticity that are featured in the different conceptualisations of the past. For example, it is plausible that marketers’ and consumers’ valorisation of vintage and heritage foreground indexical authenticity (Grayson & Martinec, 2004), that is, an authenticity that builds on factual and historical links to the past. However, as per our discussion above, it may be fruitful to understand indexical authenticity more in terms of indexical inauthenticity and/or indexical not-inauthenticity, respectively. Likewise, retro could be more about iconic authenticity (Grayson & Martinec, 2004), that is a more symbolic resemblance of a past. Again, bringing Thompson and Kumar’s (2022) authenticity contradiction to the table may offer a more nuanced understanding of iconic authenticity in terms of iconic not-inauthenticity. Both individual and collective nostalgia, however, could be more about connective authenticity (Beverland & Farrelly, 2010; Beverland et al., 2020). Yet, a differential understanding is missing in extant literature regarding how either authenticity or not-inauthenticity are involved for which conceptualisation of the past is lacking in extant literature. We know that, as Turunen and Leipämaa-Leskinen (2015) report, authenticity is a prominent reason for consumers to buy vintage objects, since the acquisition of inauthentic vintage objects poses reputational and financial risks. From that perspective, the valorisation of vintage objects as being vintage builds on the very idea of authenticity, because ‘vintage products are authentic products in that they have been produced, often entirely by hand, decades ago and embody the values and culture of those times’ (Amatulli et al., 2018, p. 617). Yet, this essentialist understanding of authenticity in the vintage context has hitherto de-emphasised perceived authenticity, such as is evident in iconic and connective authenticity, which might also be at play in the valorisation of vintage products. Similarly, a differential understanding of indexical, iconic, and connective authenticity is currently lacking in research on nostalgia, as well as retro and heritage brands.

Third, when it comes to collective nostalgia, future research should explore and illustrate the socio-cultural processes at play when market actors negotiate an idealised authenticity for past-themed market offerings. It is plausible to conceive of authenticity as a social construction that is negotiated in the market by a variety of actors (Beverland et al., 2020; Hartmann & Ostberg, 2013). However, extant literature has not yet produced a detailed understanding of how a collective understanding of authenticity as such is created in the memory and mythmaking contexts we discussed above; and in turn, how this collective understanding is shaped strategically by a variety of market actors. Understanding how and in what ways an ideal, prototypical, or programmatic authenticity is achieved in and by a certain past-themed market is likely to contribute not only to understanding the processes of collective authentication, but also the roles of various market actors involved. Such an understanding holds important implications for marketers, brand managers, and entrepreneurs aspiring to promulgate consumer and brand value in past-themed markets, because if authenticity matters, its mechanisms and processes need to be understood to inform appropriate marketing decisions particularly when it comes to marketing the past.

Fourth, literature on retro brands suggests that authenticity is a central node in the success of re-launched historical brands (Brown et al., 2003). However, it is surprising to find that extant literature does not offer a detailed analysis of how consumers, and other actors, negotiate, create, or resist authenticity in retro brands. This could, for example, be through authenticating acts and authoritative performances (Arnould & Price, 2000), but potentially also through dis-authenticating acts and de-authoritative performances. The reappearance of a historical brand with updated features on the market is likely to cause some sort of an authenticity stir for both, consumers with knowledge of the original brand, and marketers integrating the ‘new’ (features, updated performance) and ‘old’ (historical brand properties). Future research could explore consumers’ response to retro-brands similarly to extant research on individual consumers’ response to nostalgic products with a focus on a resulting authenticity judgement and how a retro brand blends ‘new’ and ‘old’ brand properties. Moreover, future research could yield important insights to the collective authentication strategies for negotiating a certain pastness of retro brands. While extant research has identified craft production to be an important authentication mechanism for a re-launched guitar brand (Hartmann & Ostberg, 2013), exactly how, why, and under which circumstances retro brands become adopted by consumers remains a relative mystery.

Fifth, future research in the heritage literature needs to explore the trajectories of heritage brands from an authenticity perspective. In fact, we still lack research that investigates if and how the authenticity of heritage brands matters to consumers. Further, when heritage brands evolve over time, tap into new markets, innovate, cancel product lines, change owners, merge, or are integrated into other organisations, we see how consumers may create resistance due to a perceived authenticity misalignment with the brand’s heritage (Han et al., 2021). The question therefore remains, how do consumers make decisions on whether changes on heritage brands are authentic or not; and what are the authenticating strategies used by heritage brands to deal with such trajectories?

Marketing management

Although we know that marketers draw on the past to promulgate brand and consumer value, extant literature directs little attention to studying the strategic efforts of marketing the past from a marketing managerial perspective. In other words, there is a striking imbalance between marketing literature on the past that incorporates a consumer perspective, and intra-organisational marketing literature that uses a producer perspective. While the heritage literature, and, to some degree the retro literature, almost exclusively uses a firm-centric managerial perspective, this perspective is absent in the nostalgia and vintage literature. We suggest that important future research opportunities emerge by studying how marketing management strategically uses the past not only in the context of heritage brands, but also more explicitly and more managerially oriented in the contexts of retro brands and products, nostalgic products and advertisements, and vintage.

The heritage literature differs from the other streams by focusing squarely on how to work strategically with the past, thereby notably de-emphasising consumers (Rindell et al., 2015). This is because the activation of a company’s heritage is regarded as a managerial exercise (Balmer & Burghausen, 2019; Burghausen & Balmer, 2014; Dion & Mazzalovo, 2016; Iglesias et al., 2020; Lee & Davies, 2021). The approach to heritage activation has been fertilised by the scholarly development of several frameworks for brand heritage (Burghausen & Balmer, 2014; Dion & Mazzalovo, 2016; Urde & Greyser, 2015; Urde et al., 2007). These frameworks serve as useful guides for managers on how to strategically approach the past-as-heritage for marketing and branding purposes. However, extant literature on nostalgia, retro, and vintage lacks such marketing managerial frameworks, with the notable exception of Brown et al. (2003) framework of retro brand success. Although the socio-cultural nostalgia literature informs us that entrepreneurs strategically create a consumable past (Brunk et al., 2018) and that nostalgia marketing can use different routes to create (re-)enchantment (Hartmann & Brunk, 2019), the underlying marketing managerial processes, decision-making, strategies, and practices remain largely ignored from an intra-organisational perspective. This basis of conceptual and empirical blind spots presents fruitful avenues for more marketing managerial research on the past.

First, future research on nostalgia could explore both, how specific past-themed strategies relate to intra-organisational decision-making processes and how managers engage with an already existing cultural material from the past. This would mean that research focuses more squarely on the producer-side of brands that play a significant role in the creation and negotiation of collective memories and myths, not only to analyse representational strategies and ideological rationales (Brunk et al., 2018), but also decision-making processes and strategic marketing management practices.

Second, future research on retro branding might offer fruitful marketing managerial insights by studying the strategic considerations and processes of re-launching historical brands, underlying brand portfolio strategies, and decision-making processes that undergird the updating of brand attributes. Moreover, there is a systematic lack of literature concerned with retro brand failures and the marketing managerial dimensions that may lie behind such failures. In addition, there are indications in the literature that retro branding does not only operate via brand meaning revival as described by Brown et al. (2003), but also via brand meaning invention and brand meaning inversion (Brunk et al., 2018), which might offer new avenues for future retro research from a managerial perspective.

Third, future research on heritage branding might produce valuable insights by empirically studying the marketing management dimensions of invented corporate heritage (Brunninge, 2023; Brunninge & Hartmann, 2019), what challenges and opportunities corporate heritage poses for internal branding (e.g. as a motivator or point of contention among employees), as well as a differential understanding of when, under which circumstances, and in which contexts corporate branding strategies strongly revolving around heritage work best across industries.

Fourth, future research on vintage is likely to produce valuable insights by extending the current ontological scope of vintage by also including the symbolic use of vintage as a label in marketing and branding activities. Compared to literature on heritage, retro, and nostalgia, we know very little about how vintage is used by marketers as part of augmenting and communicating market offerings that are, hitherto, not considered as being vintage in the current dominant ontological perspective. Future research might ask what value (if any) does labelling/branding something as vintage create for consumers and companies? Such future research might explore the tension between how ‘vintage’ is strategically appropriated by marketers versus how it is understood by consumers. Often the term is used by brands as a label that signifies a prime choice. However, this challenges how vintage is, in etic terms, mainly understood as a unique object from a bygone era that accumulates symbolic value from its circulation history and past owners (Abdelrahman et al., 2020; Duffy et al., 2012; Sarial-Abi et al., 2017; Turunen & Leipämaa-Leskinen, 2015). From a marketing perspective then, what are the ideological and strategic aims of using the label ‘vintage’ for mass-produced collections of product groups, e.g. electric guitars and fashion collections? How is vintage labelling symbolically leveraged and valorised by consumers?

Limitations

Scoping reviews are an approach to map existing research within a given topic (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005). However, as argued by Paul and Criado (2020), certain search criteria are necessary to avoid an unmanageable welter of papers. This, along with our limited foreign language skills, meant that we only included papers written in English, which potentially excludes valuable perspectives from non-English researchers, for example from the Global South (Fowler & Thomas, 2023; Kamin et al., 2022). This in turn has the unfortunate consequence that most research contexts are restricted to the Global North, with only a few exceptions (Holak et al., 2007; Roberts, 2014; Zhou et al., 2013). Including perspectives from the Global South would likely ensure a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of how the past is incorporated in marketing.

Further, we acknowledge that we chose to focus on retro, heritage, nostalgia, and vintage as the main focal concepts that deal with marketing, which implies that other concepts that are in some way related to the past have not been dealt with in the scope of this review. We decided to focus on retro, heritage, nostalgia, and vintage, because they are the most widely used concepts in current marketing literature that deal with the past. However, there might be other concepts that can be of strategic relevance for marketing that we have not focused on in this review. We encourage future research to complement our synthesis of extant research on past-themed marketing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2024.2339454

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christian Dam

Christian Dam is a PhD-student at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research focuses on the intersection of consumption and culture. He explores how past-themed marketing and consumption through resistance and play can facilitate resonance. When he is not riding his vintage bike, he finds great joy and inspiration in teaching classes on globalisation, consumer behaviour, and qualitative methods. His work received the 2023 Franco Nicosia Best Paper Award at the Association of Consumer Research Conference in Seattle, USA.

Benjamin J. Hartmann

Benjamin J. Hartmann is Professor of Business Administration with a Focus on Marketing at the School of Business, Economics, and Law, at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research interests revolve around marketing, branding, and consumer culture where he explores various issues at the intersection of consumption, markets, and society with a current passion for how marketers and consumers employ the past to create meaning.

Katja H. Brunk

Katja H. Brunk is a Professor of Marketing at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. Following many years as a marketing practitioner and consultant, she left the corporate sector to join academia and fully pursue her passion for research. Her current research focuses on the consumer cultural processes following the German reunification, past-themed consumption including retro branding and consumer nostalgia as well as issues of consumer exclusion and self-care.

Appendix

-Publications Information

Table

Journal of Business Research	26
Journal of Brand Management	23
Journal of Marketing Management	14
European Journal of Marketing	13
Psychology & Marketingf	13
Journal of Product & Brand Management	10
Advances in Consumer Research	8
Journal of Consumer Behaviour	8
Marketing Theory	7
Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal	7
Journal of Consumer Research	7
Consumption Markets & Culture	5
Marketing Intelligence & Planning	4
Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services	4
Journal of Advertising	4
Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice	3
Book	2
Business Horizons	2
Journal of Marketing	2
Tourism Management	2
Journal of Consumer Marketing	2
Marketing Letters	2
Journal of Consumer Psychology	2
International Journal of Advertising	2
Journal of Promotion Management	2
Journal of Advertising Research	2
Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing	2
Business History	1
International Studies of Management & Organization	1
Journal of Historical Research in Marketing	1
Journal of Customer Behaviour	1
International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management	1
International Journal of Tourism Research	1
Current Issues in Tourism	1
Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research	1
Industrial Marketing Management	1
International Journal of Research in Marketing	1
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science	1
Management Decision	1
Journal of Business Strategy	1
Journal of Product Innovation Management	1
International Review of Retail, Distribution & Consumer Research	1
Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality & Tourism	1
Journal of Strategic Marketing	1
Journal of Marketing Communications	1
International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation	1
International Journal of Consumer Studies	1
Journal of Consumer Culture	1
Journal of Cleaner Production	1
Corporate Reputation Review	1
Corporate Communications: An International Journal	1

Publications per year