The ads featured subtle nods to queer identities.
Shows like “The L Word” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” were still years away. This was before LGBTQ culture entered the mainstream, Bennett said. So, in a multi-year campaign, Subaru began marketing to a queer audience. In the 1990s, Subaru identified five key consumer groups for their front-wheel drive vehicles: teachers and other educators, technical professionals, engineers, “rugged individualists” and female heads of households - many of whom identified as lesbian, according to focus groups.
Tim Bennett, Subaru’s former director of marketing, was one of the people behind the campaign.Ī 1999 Subaru advertisement features three cars, with vanity license plates including “CAMP OUT,” “XENA LVR” and “P TOWNIE.” The association of lesbians with Subaru cars is the result of smart marketing. The company often purchased full-page advertisements in gay publications like The Advocate.Īnd the stereotype about women who drive Subarus? It’s not a coincidence. They did it to get a return on investment for the advertising dollars,” Mulryan said.īut many of these early advertisers still cemented themselves in queer popular culture.įor example, Absolut Vodka - a pride festival staple - began advertising to an LGBTQ customer base in 1981. He said the move by companies to market to LGBTQ people was not a radical call for acceptance. One of them, Mulryan/Nash, was co-founded in 1991 by Dave Mulryan. Most marketing used to happen on a local scale, like advertising a local gay-friendly bar, restaurant, bookstore or bathhouse.Īs recognition of gay men and lesbians grew in the 1980s and ‘90s, marketing agencies that catered to those demographics began popping up, creating advertisements for regional and national audiences. The proliferation of those rainbow logos and corporate marketing to LGBTQ people is a relatively recent phenomenon.Īdvertising to queer consumers has undergone a revolution of sorts in the past half-century, according to Blaine Branchik, a former professor at Quinnipiac University who has studied LGBTQ marketing. That means that corporations may be forced to reevaluate the effectiveness of their pride celebrations, as their underlying values and actions are being looked at more critically. Now, savvy, younger, and more queer-identifying consumers - who have grown up with greater acceptance and representation than previous generations - are continuing to enter the market.
While it may look like smart advertising, some LGBTQ people chalk up those logos - which always seem to change back on July 1 - to rainbow washing, the act of businesses advertising themselves as LGBTQ allies when their real support for rainbow causes is a bit more gray.
For the past several years, hundreds of brands have rainbow-ified their logos in celebration of Pride month.ĪT&T. If you’re on any social media platform in June, it’s hard to miss the rainbow explosion.