Commodifying the past: Nostalgia, collective memory, and cultural branding in Vietnam’s Cộng Cà Phê

In contemporary consumer culture, the past is widely mobilised as a market resource, with nostalgia used to create culturally meaningful and commercially appealing experiences. This study examines how nostalgic cultural branding operates as a process of reconstructing and commodifying collective memory. Moving beyond dominant psychological perspectives on nostalgia, the study adopts a Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) approach to explore how market environments culturally produce the past. Using a qualitative case study of Cộng Cà Phê in Vietnam, the research combines visual ethnography, semi-structured interviews and netnographic analysis to investigate how nostalgic meanings are constructed and interpreted. The findings show that nostalgic branding operates through three interrelated processes: curated representation, symbolic mediation and market valorisation. These processes transform historically grounded experiences into stylised, accessible narratives, often resulting in simplified, depoliticised representations of the past. The study contributes to consumer culture research by reconceptualising nostalgia as a process of cultural reconstruction and showing how branding practices shape and commodify collective memory, particularly in late-socialist Vietnam.