Beyoncé’s "Homecoming" and the power of nostalgia marketing

By releasing her 2018 Coachella performance as a live album and Netflix special (both called Homecoming) just days before the second weekend of the 2019 edition, Beyoncé captured the attention of music fans and outlets in a big way. In fact, nearing the end of the festival, she was trending higher on Google than this year’s top performers, including Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish, who sparked their own media fires by bringing out special guests (Grande reunited most of *NSYNC and was joined by Justin Bieber) and engineering impressive stunts (Eilish performed on a bed suspended in mid-air).

Beyoncé went one step further and made her sixth studio album, Lemonade, available on all streaming platforms after three years of Tidal exclusivity. The attention she drove to herself from all this is charted below—we pulled the data from Google Trends, which ranks artists (or search terms) on a popularity scale of 1-100. Beyoncé’s interest dipped slightly below Grande as the festival closed on Sunday.

Spotify data paints a similar picture. Though every performer but Weezer has a higher Popularity Index than Beyoncé, only she and Eilish experienced a lift (Eilish maintained a perfect score the entire time) over the second Coachella weekend. During this brief period, Kanye West and Grande trended downward by a few points.

For years, brands have used the past as a way to form deeper connections with audiences. Coke often taps into its long history to excite customers. In 2014, it brought back a discontinued 90s flavour called Splurge after a Facebook campaign demanded it. More recently, nostalgia fuelled the popularity of Pokemon Go and Stranger Things. 

Although Beyoncé only went back one year in time, the surprise announcement of Homecoming and the momentousness of her 2018 performance—it had 458,000 simultaneous live Youtube streams (the biggest for a music festival) and marked the first time an African-American woman headlined the festival—tapped into that nostalgia factor. The documentary also provided a deeper glimpse into Beyoncé’s work ethic and her life outside of being a performer, making the release of Homecoming all the more meaningful for super fans.

Naturally, just about anything Beyoncé does will get major attention. But the success of Homecoming is due in no small part to it’s calculated release strategy. In your own marketing efforts, celebrating company milestones and anniversaries, as well as creating campaigns around the communities you serve can leverage nostalgia to generate more buzz.