Journal Name: Young Consumers: Insight and Ideas for Responsible Marketers
Submission Window: 21st January 2026 to 29th May 2026
Members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha—despite growing up in digitally saturated environments—routinely engage with retro aesthetics, analog products, and resurfaced memories through features like #Throwback, Facebook Memories, and TikTok’s #nostalgia trend (Cox et al., 2015). These encounters have been shown to heighten positive affect, social connectedness, and identity continuity (Lee-Won et al., 2023), revealing nostalgia as a key emotional driver in contemporary youth culture.
Increasingly, these experiences are shaped and amplified by AI tools, social media algorithms, and virtual influencers. Pinterest (2023) reports a 385% surge in searches for “vintage aesthetic” among 18–24-year-olds, while 73% of Gen Z follow at least one brand on social media and 32% discover brands through influencers (Business Dasher, 2024; Hutchinson, 2024). Prior research demonstrates that social media marketing significantly influences young consumers’ attitudes across cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions—though these effects may vary across the purchase journey (Duffett, 2017). These trends reflect the emergence of a platform–commerce nexus in which nostalgia is not just a cultural current but a key engagement strategy for youth marketing.
Despite nostalgia’s strategic appeal, few academic studies directly examine how it functions within AI-enhanced, influencer-driven marketing ecosystems targeted at young consumers. While the persuasive impact of nostalgic advertising is well documented (Holbrook & Schindler, 2003; Muehling & Pascal, 2011), there is limited understanding of how digital tools personalize and repackage nostalgia—and what this means for consumer well-being, brand trust, and identity development.
There is also a lack of verified Gen Z sample studies, as well as a need for research on longitudinal impacts—such as whether nostalgic campaigns generate lasting loyalty or only transient engagement. Additionally, performative and cross-cultural expressions of nostalgia on platforms like TikTok remain under-theorized, even as brands increasingly adopt them.
Some promising work points the way forward. The Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) model has been used to understand how Gen Z responds to AI chatbot experiences (Elayat & Elalfy, 2025), and research on virtual influencers shows that novelty-seeking youth may engage differently depending on psychological drivers (Kholkina et al., 2025). The COVID-19 pandemic further amplified nostalgic behaviors, intensifying emotional responses to memory-driven content (Xiang et al., 2024; Lee-Won et al., 2023).