‘If you try and conduct a phone poll or target them in a community, there’s always a significant bias in the results. Gerry Keane, manager of strategic marketing research for Vancouver’s VanCity Credit Union, has had difficulties recruiting subjects. The problem for most researchers is obvious: gays and lesbians are not a visible minority. ‘They must research it and plan it and execute it like any other vertical market.’ ‘We are very much into travelling and the auto industry must make use of us.’ Real estate, he adds, is also getting interested, and Ignatius can see them doing target marketing soon. ‘The market of the future is the auto industry,’ Ignatius says. Jewellers, planners and limousine companies, he speculates, will be next. Following the recent Ontario court decision in favor of same-sex marriages, he’s had phone calls from a wedding photographer and a caterer. Within that time, Ignatius has conducted focus groups for products including toothpaste, teeth whitener, shampoo, hair colouring, face cream, deodorant and furniture. Of those, Royal Bank returned for more details about targeting gays, a bottled water company commissioned research to be conducted in Toronto and Montreal, and a tourism company contracted its own research project. In the last 12 months he gave a dozen proposals to established Canadian firms. Tyrrel Ignatius, founder and president of two-year-old Pink Marketing and Advertising in Toronto, has been telling corporate Canada about the importance of this market for the last five years. As Canada’s gays and lesbians continue to overcome old social stigmas, research will not only draw advertisers into this market, but will help them produce smart, targeted campaigns. The mythical pink dollar has enticed marketers ever since rumours of the lucrative nature of the market began circulating in the early ’90s, but few advertisers made a move before research appeared to back up the hunch. Currently running in gay and lesbian publications nationwide, Ford is considering plans to take the campaign mainstream. Care for a partner?’ and the double entendre is intentional.
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The text reads: ‘Life is full of twists and turns. not straight), a very handsome man, and a stylish product shot of the Jaguar X-Type. The result is an extremely polished print ad which combines imagery of a winding road (i.e. In mid-2002, Ford hired Witeck-Combs Communications, a strategic Washington, D.C.-based company that specializes in the gay and lesbian market, and soon launched what Ford’s VP of global marketing called, ‘one of, if not the most expansive corporate research projects for any industry on GLBT consumers.’ Jaguar, already involved in the gay market through sponsorships, was the first brand to leap on the data, which was detailed enough to allow New York gay and lesbian agency Prime Access to build unique creative, which Jaguar later tested again. Not surprisingly, research had a lot to do with it.
Ford has long advertised its Volvo and Land Rover brands in the gay press, but new ads for the luxury brand mark the company’s first national campaign that uses creative specifically designed to target gay consumers.
You might also notice a new client: Jaguar. ‘That pretty much opened everything up.’įlip through a copy of the glossy, national bi-weekly today and you will see mainstream advertisers from all categories. ‘Advertisers were astounded by the numbers they saw coming back,’ says Stephanie Blackwood, the magazine’s associate publisher at the time. The new data, indexed against the general market, confirmed the rumours and then some. The Advocate was already an astounding success, largely thanks to speculation about the unique qualities of its target demographic. In 1994, America’s first gay and lesbian news magazine published the findings of a comprehensive readership survey conducted with Simmons Market Research, then the gold standard for American print media.