Do you ever wish you could go back to your childhood? Maybe not the part where people told you what you could or couldn’t do, and your opinion didn’t really matter, but back to the essence of that carefree lifestyle. Back to the Saturday mornings, sitting in front of the TV with an ice-cold bowl of cereal and milk, watching your favorite cartoons. Would you believe that there’s a power that comes with your tight grip on nostalgia?

Due to high levels of stress, many millennials tend to suffer from anxiety and depression. As a result, we tend to hold onto things that remind us of our childhoods. Now that millennials are contributing to the economy as consumers, companies are taking notice and are using things from the past to reel us in with their marketing strategies.

Netflix Broadcasts Our Favorite Cartoons

Have You Noticed… that all of the awesome cartoons that you used to watch in the 90’s are now available on Netflix? Your love for cartoons back in the day has carried on into your adulthood. These things make us happy, so we indulge in the good old days as often as we can.

Marketing companies have noticed that millennials flock to all things retro, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We subscribe to Facebook pages based on old cartoons and re-watch episodes that we’ve seen hundreds of times on YouTube just because they make us smile.

A few years ago, Nickelodeon released a program targeted at millennials called The ‘90s Are All That. The title was based on a hit TV Show called All That, which was basically Saturday Night Live for kids. It featured shows like Kenan & Kel, Hey Arnold!, Rugrats, Doug, and a handful of other shows from the ‘90’s. This program ran on Teen Nick for over four years and aired weeknights between midnight and 4 AM, clearly a time slot directed towards millennials. You can still easily find merchandise from all of these shows because marketing companies know that we will still buy them in a heartbeat.

Movie Remakes Are In

Many of your favorite movies from back in the day are also still being remade and built upon. Movies like Tarzan, Jungle Book, and Beauty and The Beast have all recently been remade into live action movies. The Lion King has a new series called The Lion Guard and had a spin-off for Timon and Pumbaa. In the past few years, we’ve seen a surge in movies like Maleficent and Oz the Great and Powerful, which are backstories based on villains from the classic movies Sleeping Beauty and The Wizard of Oz.

This is also happening with a lot of TV shows that were popular in the ‘80s and ‘90s. If they were popular back then, why not try to capitalize on them again? Show like Full House, Boy Meets World, The X-files, and even the Powerpuff Girls have been rebooted. Companies like Netflix are investing in these because they know that these shows have such a huge following and that we will continue to watch them.

Are you a fan of Harry Potter or Toy Story? Did you notice that we seemed to grow with the characters in these coming of age stories? In the books, Harry Potter was just turning 11 years old, and it was released in 1997, followed by the movie being released in 2001. Many of us were around his age when we started reading the books and watching the movies. In case you didn’t notice, the books became darker and more complex as the series went on. We literally grew up with these characters and watched their lives progress as we matured.

The same happened with Toy Story. In the beginning, when the first Toy Story was released, Andy was a kid as most of us were. The sequel was released four years later, but it took over a decade to release the third part of this series in 2010. In this movie, Andy is a young adult and going off to college, as many of us did around that time. We have a special connection with these characters because their childhood was our childhood, and the power of that nostalgia will keep us going back to the box office every single time.

Remember The Pokemon Craze?

Another way that many millennials were taken over by nostalgia was with the release of Pokemon Go. Imagine escaping to this really cool fantasy on TV and then watching it come to life through your phone. This one app practically took over the world when it was first released. The app crashed over and over again because so many people used it at once and they weren’t prepared for that kind of response.

Video games, in general, provide an incredible amount of nostalgia for millennials because we get to experience what we felt as kids every single time we play them. Nintendo continuously releases gaming consoles that allow us to play games like Zelda and Mario Kart, which were first released in the mid-‘80s and early ‘90’s, in high definition. They continually release the same games over and over with more features and better graphics and we still buy them for the sake of nostalgia.

A New Generation Of Collectors

All of these things have led to a new generation of collectors. Because we have access to practically everything on the Internet, it’s very easy for us to hold on to the things we used to love by downloading entire series and owning even digital collections.

This is also the last generation to experience using VHS tapes, records, and other things that have been phased out due to advances in technology.

Being a millennial yourself, you know best what makes you and your peers feel nostalgic. So, you can use this awareness and experience, sell some of your old stuff. Many people search for authentic vintage products, so if you want to ride the wave of marketing to millennials, now is the time to build your business.

You simply can’t deny the power of nostalgia. You’ll buy clothes just because they have reminded you of that style from before. Or you’ll buy cereals like French Toast Crunch just because you thought you’d never taste it again after it was discontinued. The power of nostalgia has brought back retro shows, movies, food, toys, fashion, and so much more.

Millennials Love Nostalgia

Chances are, this trend of breathing new life into retro favorites will continue because millennials will never let it die. Even in social media, we revive snapshots from old shows to create memes and gifs, making them relevant all over again. At the end of the day, if you’re still attached to the lure of the ‘80’s and 90’s, embrace it, and bring it into today.