Subaru long ago showed how to market a product to gays without offending the rest of its customer base

I read an article on this in the WSJ years ago, and Bud Light’s current fiasco reminded me of when Subaru accidentally discovered that lesbians loved its cars, and so deliberately went after that segment of the market. Here’s an article on it. Written in 2016, it’s probably due for a “compare and contrast” folllow-up.

How an Ad Campaign Made Lesbians Fall in Love with Subaru

Subaru’s marketing strategy had just died in a fit of irony. 

It was the mid 1990s, and sales of Subaru cars were in decline. To reverse the company’s fortunes, Subaru of America had created its first luxury car—even though the small automaker was known for plain but dependable cars—and hired a trendy advertising agency to introduce it to the public. 

The new approach had fallen flat when the ad men took irony too far: One ad touted the new sports car’s top speed of 140 MPH, then asked, “How important is that, with extended urban gridlock, gas at $1.38 a gallon and highways full of patrolmen?”

After firing the hip ad agency, Subaru of America changed its approach. Rather than compete directly with Ford, Toyota, and other carmakers that dwarfed Subaru in size, executives decided to return to its old focus on marketing Subaru cars to niche groups—like outdoorsy types who liked that Subaru cars could handle dirt roads.

This search for niche groups led Subaru to the 3rd rail of marketing: They discovered that lesbians loved their cars. Lesbians liked their dependability and size, and even the name “Subaru.” They were four times more likely than the average consumer to buy a Subaru. 

This was the type of discovery that the small, struggling automaker was looking for. But Subaru had been looking for niche groups like skiers and kayakers—not lesbian couples. Did the company want to make advertisements for gay customers? At the time, in the mid 1990s, few celebrities were openly out. A Democratic president had just passed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and after IKEA aired one of the first major ad campaigns depicting a gay couple, someone had called in a bomb threat on an IKEA store.

Yet Subaru decided to launch an ad campaign focused on lesbian customers. It was such an unusual decision—and such a success—that it pushed gay and lesbian advertising from the fringes to the mainstream. 

If you’ve ever wondered why people joke about lesbians driving Subarus, the reason is not just that lesbians like Subarus. It’s that Subaru cultivated its image as a car for lesbians—and did so at a time when few companies would embrace or even acknowledge their gay customers.

You Are What You Drive

How do you advertise a car that journalists describe as “sturdy, if drab”?

That was the question faced by Subaru of America executives in the 1990s. After attempts to reinvigorate the company’s declining sales with a sports car and a hip, young ad agency failed, they turned to their niche marketing strategy.

“That was and still is a unique approach,” says Tim Bennett, who worked as Director of Advertising. “I’m always amazed that no one copied it.” Instead of fighting every other car company over the same demographic of white, 18- to 35-year-olds living in the suburbs, Subaru would target niche groups of people who particularly liked Subarus. 

In the 1990s, Subaru’s unique characteristic was that the company increasingly made all-wheel-drive standard on all its cars. When Subaru 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, healthcare professionals, IT professionals, and “rugged individualists” (outdoorsy types).  

Then they discovered a 5th: 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 women,” says Bennett. When Subaru marketers talked to these customers, they realized these women buying Subarus were lesbian.

“There was such an alignment of feeling, like [Subaru cars] fit with what they did,” says Paul Poux, who later conducted focus groups for Subaru. 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. (In a line some women may not like as much, marketers also said Subaru’s dependability was a good fit for lesbians since they didn’t have a man who could fix car problems.) “They felt it fit them and wasn’t too flashy,” says Poux. 

Of all the niche groups, lesbians may have exhibited the most fervor. “These women were practically commercials for Subaru,” John Nash, the creative director of the ad agency that ultimately made Subaru’s gay and lesbian advertisements, recalled in 2004. 

Subaru’s strategy called for targeting these 5 groups and creating ads based around its appeal to each. For medical professionals, it was that a Subaru with all-wheel-drive could get them to the hospital in any weather. For rugged individualists, it was that a Subaru could handle dirt roads and haul gear. For lesbians, it was that a Subaru fit their active, low-key lifestyle.  

I liked this anecdote:

When one Subaru ad man, Tim Mahoney, 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?

While the article itself focuses on Subaru’s outreach to lesbians, the lesson to be learned today, I think, is how Subaru did that without insulting and driving away (okay, we like puns here — sue us) other customers. The company sponsored lesbian bike races, for instance, back before men were allowed to compete in them, and advertised in gay magazines, but never exclusively, and never told straights that they didn’t want their business. Most importantly, they never made it political, as Budweiser did.

Robert Lachky, a former chief creative officer at Anheuser-Busch, said the decision to work with Mulvaney was a mistake, according to the Post-Dispatch.

“The minute you step into the political or religious spectrum, when you know your target audience is going to have a real issue with this, you know you’ve alienated at least half of your target audience,” he said. “People don’t like getting preached to, especially when it comes to drinking beer.”

… Lachky said current marketers do not have a good feel for Bud Light’s customers.

”None of these marketing folks has ever been to a NASCAR race; none has been to a football game or a rodeo,” he said. “That’s insanity. That’s marketing incompetence.”

Lachky was not going to give the company a pass on the mistake.

“Effectively, it took us 20 years to take But Light beer to the No. 1 beer in the country, and it took them one week to dismantle it,” he said, according to another report from the Post-Dispatch.

Apparently, Alissa Heinerscheid was absent the day they studied Subaru’s success at Wharton, or her hubris prevented her from learning from others who’d gone before her.