It was in this context that Subaru’s marketing team hired Mulryan/Nash and pitched Subaru’s Japanese management on ads for lesbian customers. “All the rules of marketing went out the window at this fear” of marketing to gays and lesbians, he says. Early in his career, he made cold calls to ask companies for their business. When a 1994 IKEA ad featured a gay couple, the American Family Association, a nonprofit, mounted boycotts, and someone called in a (fake) bomb threat to an IKEA store.Īs Poux explains, the attitude of most businesses toward LGBTQ advertising was: “Why would you do something like that? You’d be known as a gay company.” In the 1990s, Poux worked at Mulryan/Nash, an agency that specialized in the gay market. “The environment around this is so angry we feel we lose no matter what we do.”Īt that time, gay-friendly advertising was largely limited to the fashion and alcohol industries. “We don’t think it is a smart business decision to be advertising in an environment that is so polarized,” a spokesperson for Chrysler explained after the company pulled its ads. When Ellen Degeneres became a rare exception in 1997, and her character in the show Ellen came out as gay in an episode of the sitcom, many companies pulled their ads. Mainstream movies and TV shows with gay characters-like Will & Grace-were still a few years away, and few celebrities were openly gay. Pop culture also had yet to embrace the LGBTQ cause. Gay causes seemed to be on the losing side of the culture war: The Clinton administration had just instituted its Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy regarding homosexuality in the military, and in 1996, Congress would pass the Defense of Marriage Act. “I can’t emphasize enough that this was before there was any positive discussion ,” says Tim Bennett. Talking with people involved in Subaru’s 1990s marketing campaign, the constant refrain is how different the environment was back then. And it did so at a time when few companies would embrace or even acknowledge their gay customers. People joke about lesbians’ affinity for Subarus, but what’s often forgotten is that Subaru actively decided to cultivate its image as a car for lesbians. It was such an unusual decision-and such a success-that it helped push gay and lesbian advertising from the fringes to the mainstream. For lesbians, it was that a Subaru fit their active, low-key lifestyle.Īlthough it was easier to get senior management on board with making ads for hikers than for lesbians, the company went ahead with the campaign anyway. For rugged individualists, it was that a Subaru could handle dirt roads and haul gear. For medical professionals, it was that a Subaru with all-wheel drive could get them to the hospital in any weather conditions. Subaru’s strategy called for targeting these five core groups and creating ads based on its appeal to each. “They felt it fit them and wasn’t too flashy,” says Poux. The marketers found that lesbian Subaru owners liked that the cars were good for outdoor trips, and that they were good for hauling stuff without being as large as a truck or SUV. “There was such an alignment of feeling, like fit with what they did,” says Paul Poux, who later conducted focus groups for Subaru. When marketers talked to these customers, they realized these women buying Subarus were lesbian. “When we did the research, we found pockets of the country like Northampton, Massachusetts, and Portland, Oregon, where the head of the household would be a single person-and often a woman,” says Tim Bennett, who was the company’s director of advertising at the time. When the company’s marketers went searching for people willing to pay a premium for all-wheel drive, they identified four core groups who were responsible for half of the company’s American sales: teachers and educators, health-care professionals, IT professionals, and outdoorsy types. In the 1990s, Subaru’s unique selling point was that the company increasingly made all-wheel drive standard on all its cars. Rather than fight larger car companies over the same demographic of white, 18-to-35-year-olds living in the suburbs, executives decided to market their cars to niche groups-such as outdoorsy types who liked that Subarus could handle dirt roads. After the company’s attempts to reinvigorate sales- by releasing its first luxury car and hiring a hip ad agency to introduce it to the public-failed, it changed its approach. That was the question faced by Subaru of America executives in the 1990s. How do you advertise a car that journalists describe as “sturdy, if drab”?
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