“As Millennials and Gen X take the reins of spending power, the toys, games and pop culture icons they grew up with are being reimagined and re-marketed not just as entertainment, but as emotional currency, and it’s paying dividends across generations.”
Luke Boyle, Commercial Consultant
Nostalgia is one of the most powerful plays any operation can make. It gets right to the heart of emotional connection, and that has traditionally been deployed to devastating effect in the worlds of music and arts, fashion and culture.
Marketers and communicators have also discovered it to be a crucial weapon in the comms armoury. Flooding your social media feeds with ‘things that were great in the 80s’ is bound to up the shares and engagement. Look closer, and we might also suggest those political parties who have an ability to capitalise on memories of ‘when things were better’ are also finding favour (that’s a subjective matter and one we won’t get into today!) with voters over the last few years.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that other industries will also seek to lean into the warm glow of nostalgia. Retail, and in particular the games and toys, is enjoying something of a boom time based on the lives we used to love and remember well.
Millennials, Gen-X and the Rise of the ‘Kidult’ Economy
It’s worth setting the scene here to think about who’s now holding the spending power: Millennials and Gen-Xers are enormously influential. Don’t act surprised: Millennials are now in their 30s and early 40s, meaning Gen X are reaching the age of becoming grandparents and considering retirement. They have families, homes and successful roles at the top of leading organisations.
Retailers are becoming smarter than ever in pressing the right psychological buttons that release the proverbial purse strings and what we want to spend our hard-earned cash on.
Gamers, brought up as kids and teens on a diet of regular Xbox and PlayStation updates and launches around the turn of the century, would have been among the first to take up the controls on popular games such as Call of Duty. That game itself is now more than 20 years old and shows no sign of becoming any less popular. A recently launched update to Call of Duty revealed that this game alone enjoys more than 100m fans worldwide.
Mums and dads who remain loyal to their gamer days can now sit down with their own children to enjoy the two-player versions in ways their parents before them are unlikely to have ever done previously. This is family time to a great many, and those in the toy and games industry are wise to the fact this plays on positive emotions and memories and also ‘ticks boxes’ for parents thinking of ways of coaxing their kids off the phone and out of their bedroom.
This growing acceptance of ‘kidults’ and their hobbies now lasting well beyond their youth and comfortably into parenthood means the games and pastimes they loved then remain valid and marketable now, long after their shelf life may have ordinarily expired. It’s a potential goldmine.
From Comics to Collectibles: When Nostalgia Becomes High Value
When you think of the cultural developments, especially in the symbiotic relationships between film and gaming, then it’s easy to understand why the big studios are consistently happy to drop their straws into well-worn pools that offer the closest thing you can imagine to a sure-fire Hollywood hit
The Avengers franchise, as just one example, has released four films in a little over ten years, and each and every release becomes bigger at the box office than the last. However, the sales of associated merchandise alone – clothing, toys, action figures and other collectibles – are estimated to be worth more than $34bn to Disney. Let’s remember this all comes from a comic book that first floated the idea of The Avengers as a collective in 1963. Iron Man, Ant-Man, Thor, Hulk and Wasp are looking good for lads well into their 60s!
Any of you who collected your comics back in those days or have inherited collections from parents themselves? It might be worth a look in the attic. A pristine copy of Avengers No 1 comic was sold at auction for more than £300,000 just a few years ago.
And here’s another reason nostalgia can play very strongly in the world of toys and gaming. Originals are enormously collectible and can carry substantial price tags when owners decide to cash in. Those ‘kidults’ who remember tearing their Star Wars action figures to pieces after months and months of overuse have frustratingly seen the exact same replicas be sold for many thousands, sometimes even more, when in original, untouched boxing.
A 1979 Boba Fett prototype action figure from Star Wars sold for more than £1m at auction. The price was so high as the figure was never actually released, due to fears its firing mechanism was a bit too powerful for a child’s toy. Very few of the prototypes remain (any child of the late 70s and early 80s will probably tell you it now sounds pretty shocking that any toy from that period would be shelved due to health and safety concerns!).
Nostalgia That Nurtures: Wellness, Mindfulness and Purposeful Play
We could list for days the number of popular brands that have stood the test of time and made the seamless pass across the generations, fuelled mostly by Mum and Dad’s memories of them from their own childhood. Barbie, as one example, has consistently and successfully reinvented herself since her launch in the 1950s and received possibly her biggest ever injection of new fans with the release of the enormously popular 2023 film, starring Margot Robbie in the lead role.
Lego too, originally launched in the format we all now know in the late 1950s, has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in the last 20 years after a fallow period. Their realisation that mums and dads longed to ‘build something’ with their children spawned special sets for just about anything under the sun, from Ferrari F1 cars and Star Wars Death Stars to florist shops, farms and beauty parlours.
However, some of these sets retail for many, many hundreds of pounds, though, and are clearly not aimed at a child audience, given their value and complexity. The grown-up market is most definitely there. We’re willing to wager we’ve all been in a management coaching session when Lego gets tipped onto the table to see how a team reacts to certain tasks.
Mindful exercises, such as building with Lego, or even simple creative tasks like colouring in, are proven to dramatically shift neurological performance, reducing the activeness of the prefrontal cortex. It’s known as a ‘flow state’ that can result in a sense of timelessness, calm and effortless focus.
When the science points to us quite literally losing all track of time while undertaking pastimes like this, it can come as little surprise that those trying to discover – or rediscover from the past – the next big thing in toys and games, are seeking things that remove us physically and mentally from the anxieties and stresses of everyday lives.
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