405. IJRM. Regressive Nostalgia.
April 2, 2026
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In this episode, Finola Kerrigan, professor of marketing at Birmingham Business School, discusses research she and her colleagues published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, based on a ten-year study of James Bond fan communities and the concept they call regressive nostalgia.
The research began with a straightforward question: how does a brand persist across decades of changing actors, directors, and cultural norms? What the team found among the most vocal Bond fans complicated the standard marketing playbook on community engagement.
Key ideas from the conversation:
Regressive nostalgia defined: a pattern in which fans reject a brand's current positioning in favor of an idealized version of its past, often tied to historical power structures like racial purity and heroic masculinity
The vocal minority problem: the most active online fans may be the least representative of the broader audience, and amplifying their preferences can stall a brand's cultural evolution
Brand stewardship over fan appeasement: Barbara Broccoli's approach to Bond (e.g., moving with the times without claiming to drive social progress) as a model for managing heritage IP
Co-optation risk: how brands with physical, wearable products (Fred Perry, for example) face different regressive nostalgia exposure than experiential franchises
Competition as a tool: encouraging debates, polls, and ranked preferences among fans can surface a wider range of voices and dilute regressive tendencies
The episode lays out a framework for any brand manager sitting on a long-running property and deciding which audience signals to act on and which to set aside.
Click here for the Research Article
The Up Next podcast’s access to this content is courtesy of the International Journal of Research in Marketing, an international, double-blind peer-reviewed journal for marketing academics and practitioners. IJRM aims to contribute to the marketing discipline by providing high-quality, original research which advances marketing knowledge and techniques. As marketers increasingly draw on diverse and sophisticated methods, IJRM‘s target audience is comprised of marketing scholars, practitioners (e.g., marketing research and consulting professionals) and policymakers.
IJRM aims to be at the forefront of the marketing field with a particular emphasis on bringing timely ideas to market. The journal embraces innovative research with the potential to spur future research and influence practice. Hence, it welcomes contributions in various aspects of marketing. The editors, while accepting a wide array of scholarly contributions from different disciplinary approaches, especially encourage research that is novel, visionary or path breaking.
Interviewee
Finola Kerrigan is Professor of Marketing at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham. Her research has explored a range of marketing and consumer research issues, particularly in the area of arts and culture. She has published widely on film marketing, celebrity culture, and digital identity. Finola is the author of Film Marketing and joint editor in chief of the journal Marketing Theory. She has published in leading international journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Consumer Research, International Journal of Research in Marketing.
Coauthors
Chloe Preece is Professor of Marketing at ESCP Business School. Her research is in the field of marketing, specifically marketing within the arts and creative industries. To date this research has focused on production and consumption issues in the arts and how this translates into social, cultural and economic value. She is currently chair of the Arts, Heritage, Non-profit and Social Marketing Special Interest Group of the Academy of Marketing and Head of Research at ESCP London campus. Chloe has published in leading journals including Journal of Consumer Research, International Journal of Research in Marketing and Annals of Tourism Research among others.
Daragh O'Reilly is an independent researcher and writer. His research focuses on the relationship between the arts and business.
His work has been published in a number of marketing journals.
International Journal of Research in Marketing
Interviewee
Finola Kerrigan
Coauthors
Chloe Preece
Daragh O'Reilly