Canadian Politics Today

Renault is the new Subaru - 30 years in the making!

awwwwwww


The first ad I ever saw aimed at gay women was a print ad in some magazine, for a car brand that I can't recall. Maybe it was Subaru, maybe not, I'm not sure.  This was probably 15 years ago, when I was still figuring things out.  Anyway, the picture was of an attractive short-haired brunette woman in business attire, holding car keys and smirking.  In the background, there's a car and leaning against the car is an attractive femme-looking blonde with a flirty smile. The caption said something along the lines of "When you know what you want."  And I remember thinking "gee, even an ad aimed at gay women still has typical male sexism."

There's a stereotype that a certain type of woman drives Subarus.

I just read this
interesting article on the history of Subarus and lesbians. It dates back to a time when Subaru was struggling to sell cars in North America, and was looking for a niche-- any niche.  They identified four groups who bought a lot of Subarus, and while doing that research, stumbled onto the connection with lesbians almost by accident:

In the 1990s, Subaru’s unique selling point was that the company increasingly made all-wheel drive standard on all its cars. 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.

Then they discovered a fifth: lesbians. “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 marketers talked to these customers, they realized these women buying Subarus were lesbian.

Japanese executives were initially confused by the idea...

It was in this context that Subaru’s marketing team hired Mulryan/Nash and pitched Subaru’s Japanese management on ads for lesbian customers. Writing in the Huffington Post, the reporter Ron Dicker captured some of the cultural confusion that followed:

Quote

When one Subaru ad man … proposed the gay-targeting ads in talks with Japanese executives, the executives hurriedly looked up “gay” in their dictionaries. Upon reading the definition, they nodded at the idea enthusiastically. Who wouldn’t want happy or joyous advertising?

“It was certainly a learning process for everybody,” says Bennett. While Bennett, who is gay, didn’t reveal his sexual orientation for fear of overshadowing the effort, he nonetheless recalls holding company meetings with names along the lines of “Who Are Gays and Lesbians?”

...but it turned out to be a success for them, and a groundbreaking moment in the advertising industry as well.



 -k