How Subarus Came to Be Seen as Cars for Lesbians

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.

.. “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. “They felt it fit them and wasn’t too flashy,” says Poux.

.. For starters, there was a great business case for the marketing campaign. Subaru was struggling, and its niche marketing campaign was its plan for redemption.

.. Although the marketing team worried about conservatives mounting a boycott, Subaru developed a public stance: Since the company sold cars to, in the company’s words, a “diverse and well educated” group of people, their customers wouldn’t be offended by the ads.

.. In response to the ads, Subaru received letters from a grassroots group that accused the carmaker of promoting homosexuality. Everyone who penned a letter said they’d never buy a Subaru again. But the marketing team quickly discovered that none of the people threatening a boycott had ever bought a Subaru. Some of them had even misspelled “Subaru.”

.. For its first Subaru ads, Mulryan/Nash hired women to portray lesbian couples. But the ads didn’t get good reactions from lesbian audiences. What worked were winks and nudges. One campaign showed Subaru cars that had license plates that said “Xena LVR” (a reference to Xena: Warrior Princess, a TV show whose female protagonists seemed to be lovers) or “P-TOWN” (a moniker for Provincetown, Massachusetts, a popular LGBT vacation spot).

.. While Volkswagen played coy about whether an ad perceived as gay-friendly really portrayed a gay couple, Subaru sponsored events like gay-pride parades, partnered with the Rainbow Card, a credit card that instead of cash back offered donations to gay and lesbian causes, and hired Martina Navratilova, a former tennis pro and a lesbian, to appear in Subaru ads.

.. gay and lesbian consumers consistently choose Subaru vehicles as their favorite cars or Subaru as the most gay-friendly brand. As one focus-group participant put it, “Martina Navratilova is a spokesperson. What more do you want?”

.. by looking into the policies they had for their employees, like benefits for same-sex partners

.. When Ford created gay-friendly ads, it revised its policies for its more than 100,000 employees.

 

Donald Trump: The Art of Losing the Deal

The underlying story of the rally was that Trump wanted to distract attention from the fact that he had faced down Ailes and lost.

.. Having lost the battle over Kelly, he shifted to a new demand. “Trump offered to appear at the debate upon the condition that Fox News contribute $5 million to his charities,” the network said in a statement.

.. Trump may not be as great a negotiator as he proclaims, but he is undeniably a terrific marketer, with an impressive ability to spin defeats into victories.

.. Any other candidate would have been pilloried for doing what he did—you can imagine the consequences if Hillary Clinton tried to skip a Democratic debate because she objected to Anderson Cooper’s presence, then announced that she would host a charity event instead and use the Clinton Foundation to collect the money.

How Energy-Drink Companies Prey on Male Insecurities

Over the past two decades, as U.S. soft-drink consumption has declined—full-calorie-soda sales dropped twenty-five per cent during that period, according to a recent Times report—the energy-drink market has been thriving. The beverages are consumed regularly by thirty-one per cent of kids between the ages of twelve and seventeen, and by thirty-four per cent of those aged eighteen to twenty-four. U.S. sales for energy drinks and shots now total more than twelve and a half billion dollars—a number that the market-research firm Packaged Facts predicts will grow by another nine billion dollars by 2017.

.. They found that the more a man bought into masculine ideals, the more he believed that energy drinks made him manly—and the more he drank them, the more his sleep was troubled.

.. While the connection between unrealistic standards of beauty and low self-esteem, body dissatisfaction, and disordered eating among girls and women has been widely researched and discussed, this study is one of the few to establish a link between marketing to male insecurity and unhealthy habits.

.. The study builds, in part, on a 2013 Taiwanese paper showing that college-age men used the drinks to “regulate their personal sense of masculinity” and that they will drink more of them if they perceive their masculinity to be threatened.

.. Sugar is what Wade calls “a feminized calorie.” Women tend, in advertising, to be depicted as consumers of sweet things, like chocolate and fruity drinks, while men are more associated with red meat and savory snacks, like spicy tortilla chips. The challenge for sweet energy beverages, Wade said, “was to figure out how to man them up. So you associate them with extreme sports and extremely good performance.”

.. The result has been that family fridges now often contain multiple varieties of drinks, devised to reassure the demographical identity of each member.

.. companies can sell more products if they convince consumers to divide their purchases by gender—so that, for example, husbands and wives can’t share a shampoo.

.. When consumed over a long term, Levant’s study confirmed that, in college-age men, the drinks can cause anxiety, dehydration, insomnia, and cardiovascular vascular problems.