When was the last time you spent an afternoon riding a Schwinn bicycle, sipping from a custom sports bottle, and waving to your neighbors with the wind blowing through your hair? I’m guessing, for most of our readers, not recently, although I know my coworker Acree happens to be an avid cyclist.
Nostalgia marketing is a powerful technique used by marketers to capitalize on the sentimental associations that their target audiences harbor for certain products and/or experiences. At 23, I rarely find myself feeling nostalgic about my past, but last Sunday afternoon, as I ventured out to Atlanta’s Virginia Highlands neighborhood to enjoy the beautiful weather with my dog and my sister, I spied a father on the sidewalk across the street teaching his young daughter how to ride her bicycle without training wheels.
For more about Schwinn’s advertising campaign and my latest personal wave of nostalgia, keep reading…
Memories of my father patiently teaching me how to ride my Schwinn bicycle came rushing back. Lucky for the man I saw on Sunday, his daughter was much more cooperative as a pupil than I had been back in the day!
A new campaign launched by Schwinn Bicycles to reclaim its position as a premier bicycle manufacturer (shown above) features an attractive young woman riding her Schwinn bike around town, and as she rings her promotional bike bell, she spreads cheer to the pedestrians she leaves in her wake. A shot of a young boy playing a video game under a tree suddenly transitions to the same boy playing on a tire swing with friends when the “br’ring-ding” of the bike bell sounds; a businessman in a suit is no longer engaged in an obviously stressful cell phone conversation, but is holding an adorable puppy; kids helping their mother load groceries into their car are surprised by the appearance of an ice cream truck…
Basically, the care-free cyclist spreads cheer wherever she travels, and with just one sounding of her bike bell, the people around her forget about their cares and escape reality. The light-hearted, breezy marketing “fluff” of this ad is not meant to be a hard sell for Schwinn bikes, although the zoomed picture of the promotional “Schwinn” brand bicycle bell early in the commercial does make it known that the commercial is for Schwinn. Rather, it encourages people to take time out of their busy schedules to enjoy the great outdoors and retrieve their old bikes from the back of their garages. Call me an easy target, but I fell for the message hook, line, and sinker. I can’t wait to pull out my old bike and take to the sidewalks for some laid-back summer fun.