Priceonomics Details Subaru's Lesbian Marketing Love Affair

Subaru didn’t always enjoy the recession-beating success it’s famous for today. In the ’90s, sales at Subaru were in the tank, and marketers in the company needed to do something different.

After identifying core groups interested in its cars, Subaru found something curious: lesbians, for whatever reason, loved Subaru. For our edutainment, Priceonomics has detailed the history of Subaru loving those lesbians right back.

Aside from the internet trope that dictates at least one Mustang driver must crash at every Cars and Coffee event, there can’t be a much stronger automotive stereotype than lesbians loving Subarus. It’s a stereotype that may or may not have cajoled TTAC’s founder into comparing the grille of the B9 Tribeca with a certain part of the female anatomy, and it certainly fueled a job-killing headline of another TTAC E-I-C in the recent past. (I’m not linking to it, but I’m sure you can find it yourself if you really must read it.)

Yet, sometimes stereotypes — especially when it comes to marketing to certain demographics — exist for a reason. In the case of Subaru, its director of advertising Tim Bennett and gay-market specialist ad agency Mulryan/Nash transformed the automaker’s marketing message to develop wink-and-nod messages to the lesbian and gay communities after identifying groups of buyers who skew toward Subaru.

From Pricenomics:

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.

Subaru crafted its marketing to identify with lesbian buyers without offending the sensibilities of conservatives.

However, it wasn’t an easy plan to put in motion.

The fascinating story is detailed at Pricenomics. Trust me — it’s worth a read.

h/t to Steve