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China's old brands: commercial heritage and creative nostalgia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2020
Abstract
China's commercial revival of the 1980s initiated a wave of nostalgia for old brands, which various political and commercial actors spent the subsequent four decades trying to develop, enhance, or exploit. Such attempts can be divided into two types: the heritage approach of the “old brands revitalization project” and the “creative nostalgia” of retro advertising. Both aim to nurture a sense of nostalgia for old brands, but they espouse opposing logic: the former emphasizing authenticity, while the latter mines the past for fun, novelty, and irony. These trends are expressed in the food sector, which comprises the majority of classic enterprises, and has been shaped by explosive growth. Rather than a generational rejection of the past, it is the rush to establish a presence in the crowded national market that drives China's classic food brands to repackage nostalgia from authenticity to novelty, from scarcity to replicability, and from heritage to retro.1
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press
Footnotes
This paper was presented at the “Politics of Nostalgia: Populism, Branding and Nation-State,” symposium in Kanazawa, and online in the Yiwulü Anthropology Lecture 医巫闾人类学讲座 series as 杜博思, “Zhongguo laozihao pinpai: yichan, chuangxin, huaijiu“ 中国老字号品牌:遗产,创新,怀旧 (China's laozihao brands: heritage, creativity, nostalgia)”. Ryoko Nakano, Shu Ping 舒萍, Wu Shixu 吴世旭, Zhan Na 詹娜, Mao Wei 毛伟, and Xiao Kunbing 肖坤冰, and the journal's two anonymous readers provided generous and insightful criticism.
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