I drive a subaru because im gay show name
I was recently lent the latest Subaru Forester to quiz drive, and I enjoyed its sturdiness, its space and the frugality of its 2.0 hybrid engine. But as my mileage progressed over the course of a week’s bombing around the back roads of north Norfolk, I started to contain a hankering for a nose chime, a tattoo of interlocking female glyphs, and to dye my hair pink and blue and wear dungarees. I put on a k.d. lang playlist, drove home, and watched Angelina Jolie in Gia. Was the Subaru turning me – a bloke, with no unusual pronouns – into a lesbian?
Let me explain. In the 1990s, Subaru launched a calculated and groundbreaking advertising campaign on the US market. Rather than try to compete with their bigger rivals (Ford, Toyota etc) over the same white-bread suburban demographic, the Japanese company went after niche groups. Subaru built respectable but drab cars, yet they had a USP: their cars were all-wheel-drive, and the five groups that were identified as willing to pay a premium for AWD were teachers, healthcare professionals, IT professionals, outdoorsy types – and lesbians.
Lesbians – ideally outdoorsy lesbians, who perhaps worked in computers, medicine or education – found
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How an Ad Campaign Made Lesbians Fall in Like 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 smooth 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 come back to its old focus on marketing Subaru cars to niche groups—like outdoorsy types who liked that Subaru cars could treat 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 n
Case study: Subaru
The beginning
How perform you advertise a automobile that journalists describe as “sturdy, if drab”? That was the question faced by Subaru of America executives in the 1990s. When the company’s marketers went searching for people willing to pay a premium for all-wheel guide , 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 investigate, 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.
In the ‘90s, gay-friendly advertising was largely limited to the fashion and alcohol industries. Pop culture had also yet to embrace the LGBT cause. Mainstream movies and TV shows with gay characters - enjoy Will & Grace - were still a couple of years away, and few celebrities were openly gay.
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