#150 1996 · Subaru of America / Mulryan/Nash · Automotive / advertisingwrong-door
Subaru found its most loyal customers hiding in its own sales data and became the first car brand to advertise to them by name
the problem
A struggling brand's most valuable customer segment can be invisible if nobody has ever looked at the data with the right question in mind
background
Subaru's US sales were flat to declining in the early-to-mid 1990s, and the company's marketing was competing head-on with larger, better-funded automakers over the same broad audience every car brand chased. Standard practice for a struggling mid-size auto brand was to keep competing for that same mainstream audience with a bigger ad budget or a sharper price message — not to dig into who was already disproportionately buying the product and ask why.
Subaru's Director of Advertising, Tim Bennett, found something odd digging into the sales data: pockets of the country — Northampton, Massachusetts; Portland, Oregon — showed a striking concentration of single-woman-headed households buying Subarus. Interviewing those customers revealed many were lesbians, drawn to the cars' reliability, standard all-wheel drive, and practical cargo space for outdoor gear, without the bulk of a truck. Subaru's own market research found lesbians were purchasing the brand at roughly four times the rate of the average car buyer, a segment literally no other automaker was marketing to at the time.
the move
After roughly a year and a half securing approval from Japanese parent company Fuji Heavy Industries, Subaru hired Mulryan/Nash, an agency specializing in LGBT marketing, in 1996 and ran ads with double meanings and coded references legible to lesbian audiences but invisible to anyone not looking for them — a license plate reading 'Xena LVR,' another reading 'P-TOWN' (for Provincetown), and taglines like 'It's Not a Choice. It's the Way We're Built,' referring simultaneously to Subaru's standard all-wheel drive and to sexual identity.
the payoff
Subaru's flat sales reversed into sustained growth following the campaign, and the company's broader turnaround was significant enough that parent company Fuji Heavy Industries later rebranded its entire corporate identity around the Subaru name. Among the 40–50 partner organizations Subaru worked with annually to offer employee/member vehicle discounts, LGBT organizations consistently ranked among the top five by vehicles sold.
what came after
Subaru is widely credited as the first mainstream automotive brand to advertise directly and consistently to gay and lesbian consumers, and the campaign is cited across marketing literature as the model other major corporations followed when they began courting the same market in the early 2000s — Subaru's continued reputation today as a culturally gay- and lesbian-friendly car brand traces directly back to this 1996 campaign.
references
- [1]How an Ad Campaign Made Lesbians Fall in Love with SubaruPriceonomics, 2016priceonomics.com
- [2]How Subaru created the blueprint for selling cars to LGBTQIA+ consumersThe Next Web, 2021thenextweb.com
- [3]Lesbians and Subarus: Why Do Lesbians Love Outbacks and Foresters?Slate, 2014slate.com