Ian Johnson, Out Now
November 12, 2007
TOPICS: Gay marketing. GLBT market research. Gay community marketing. Metrosexual. Gay men and Gen Y. Tweens, teens and Gen Y adopt characteristics of interest to marketers and traditionally associated with gay men. The rise and rise of the Young Metrosexual. Mainstream marketers are increasingly witnessing a growing uptake of shopping and marketing traits that were traditionally identified only with gay men amongst young upwardly mobile male tweens, teens and Gen Y consumers.
The day of the Young Metrosexual is upon us. Look out Generation X: Gen Y is set to take the mantle of metrosexual cool right out from underneath your rapidly aging demographic.
Gay Market News has reported before on the long abused marketing term 'metrosexual' as it is traditionally used to describe the growth of an urban heterosexual male consumer -- usually from Generation X -- who acts and, more importantly to marketers, spends like, well, a gay man.
Fashion, grooming products, gym memberships, hair styling, skincare, designer labels and more gay must-haves than a gay man could fit on a shopping list.
But when Mark Simpson first coined the term metrosexual, he was referring to what was then a new trend. Now it seems the original metrosexuals are in danger of being usurped by a fast growing youth market that is threatening to swamp the original Gen X metrosexuals, many of whom are now thinking more about career promotion and babies names than they are about what the Spring collection of Prada jeans will look like.
Generation Y, teens and, we would proffer, even tweens markets are all markets showing definite trends towards what has in the past been seen as the shopping and marketing consumer domain of the gay man.
Caring about how one looks to others, especially to other men, was almost exclusively the preserve of gay men, and in the 1990s many marketers got excited as gay men in particular became the hot new marketing niche.
If gay men are trend setters even half as often as we get asked if they are, then they could probably lay claim all on their own to this emerging trend amongst younger consumers to want to buy the best in fashion labels, grooming products, designer labels and hair styling.
Once it was not macho enough to profess an interest in such things.
Now the younger male market cannot seem to get enough of their labels.
Clothes, grooming and accessories are becoming the baseball cards of the school playground as young men compare and envy the labels of other young men.
Time was when only gay men did that.
What does it all mean?
Gay men can perhaps take some of the credit for bringing additional street cred to rampant brand loyalty, but in my mind the real credit belongs to the growing effectiveness of marketers working at the brands in question.
They have managed to take what was once seen as trends too gay to be palatable to the mainstream, wrapped it in consumer desire and marketed the hell out of it to successfully create this season's must have brands amongst the Gen Y target marketing demographic.
Young men are notoriously hard to reach but through sharp marketing and clever brand positioning strategies, the rise of the Young Metrosexual shows that things that were once only gay are now seen as trendy and cool.
So the rise of gay marketing -- and the parallel ascent and acceptability of the Metrosexual -- both look like marketing trends that seem set to continue for quite some years to come.
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