Back from the dead: just a few of the brands magnanimously resurrected "by popular demand".

Good news, everyone! Barney Banana ice creams are back! The iconic banana-flavoured ice cream was first launched in 1958 and was known to generations of Australian kids, but by 2003 demand had petered out and Nestle Peters discontinued the brand.

That was until radio host Dave O’Neil, from baby boomer radio station Vega 91.5FM, spearheaded a grassroots campaign to bring them back. Nestle duly decided to relaunch Barney Banana under the Billabong brand.

“In Australia the trend towards nostalgia is strong and is seen in the revival of brands and products from cars through to confectionery,” Nestle Peters marketing boss Mauricio Alarcon told B&T. “Barney Banana is no exception and we’ve been overwhelmed by the public interest to bring him back and so have activated the campaign in record time.”

Guess you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. Personally I wasn’t aware that Barney Banana had ever gone away, but that’s the genius of these campaigns to bring back nostalgic foodstuffs.

Manufacturers are saved from the trouble of having to produce unpopular foodstuffs, then if a groundswell of popularity ever builds up, they get to look like heroes for putting them back on the market, and consumers get to feel their whims can influence manufacturers. And it’s a new injection of public awareness and goodwill for a moribund brand… without the need for expensive relaunch campaigns.

Online social networks and petition websites are the primary ‘grassroots’ rallying point. Currently, the most popular foodstuffs begging to be brought back are international brands: Dunkaroos biscuit dipping snacks (41 Facebook groups) and Surge soft drink (73 Facebook groups), Coca-Cola’s attempt to compete with Pepsi-Cola’s Mountain Dew. In the case of Surge, Coca-Cola informed one of the petitioners that if more than 300,000 consumers indicated their interest, the company would resurrect the brand.

There are also some pretty arcane products being longed for, such as Cadbury Three Wishes chocolate, Mars Drink and Arnotts Honey Snap biscuits. A straw poll in The Enthusiast’s electronic offices also revealed longings for Mello Yello soft drink (which, interestingly, was resurrected as a limited edition product in New Zealand from 2006-7), Cadbury Furry Friends chocolates and Eights cereal, which apparently was similar to Nutri-Grain but instead came in tiny figure-eights.

Interestingly, many of the products being longed for were originally produced as limited-edition product lines that were never intended to be ‘brought back’, such as novelty burgers at KFC, Hungry Jack’s and McDonald’s and novelty flavours of Coke and Pepsi. In these cases, it seems that “bring it back!” seems less like an actual request and more like an injection of urgency into the nostalgia, a vivid kind of retrospective appreciation.

Other products with Facebook campaigns show consumers’ dissatisfaction with changes to existing products. Apparently Cadbury Picnic ice cream has a much worse formula now than in 2002; chicken-flavoured Maggi Noodles have a terrible new flavour; Twinings tea bags have a stupid new design; and – most poignant of all – the famous holes in Vita-Weat biscuits are no longer big enough to enable the creation of ‘worms’.

In these cases, it seems that nostalgia relies on a product continuing to be made in a recognisable fashion for as long as consumers can remember. Paradoxically, claiming a product’s “newness” is one of the oldest tricks in the advertising book; but there is clearly value in fetishising “oldness” – as long as the old product is first yanked off the market to create a public sense of loss, and then brought back, exactly the same as consumers remember it. (Heinz, however, valiantly promoted the ‘oldness’ of its beans with its “Some things never change” campaign.)

Nestle has experience with nostalgia relaunches – last October it brought back the Monaco Bar due to consumer demand. Smiths brought back Tasty Toobs in 2006 after a consumer petition, and Samboy chips are now produced, along with other iconic Australian chip varieties, by an Australian-made, Australian-owned consortium called Snack Brands Australia. However, it seems Cadbury Schweppes is still standing stalwart in the face of consumer pressure to relaunch Dr Pepper, which was discontinued in 2003 and is currently only available in speciality import shops.

Intriguingly, people seem to remember the old ads as much as the actual taste of the product and rituals around buying it. Most people, for instance, would remember the old “munch on Muncheros” jingle, but can’t clearly recall the crispy, curly, cheesy corn chips being hawked. Samboy is one of the best managed nostalgia brands in this respect: the website actually showcases the old ad campaigns and encourages Samboy fans to make their own YouTube ads based on these shared cultural memories.

Now over to you: What are the products you wish would be brought back – and the ones that deserve to die a quiet, forgotten death?