Ian Johnson, Out Now
December 6, 2007
TOPICS: Lesbian and gay community marketing. Gay nightlife marketing. US gay market. Boston gay market. US gay community marketing. Gay community demographics. Boston Globe article on Boston market shrinking gay nightlife scene.The marketing of goods and services to the gay and lesbian communities really began with the emergence of a nascent market for gay consumers to be actively marketed to.
That happened in many economies around the 1970s and onwards, as this gay marketing Citizendium article highlights.
Then, in the 1980s, as gay marketing increased in importance, the brands that decided to target the lesbian and gay consumer market started to piggyback off the existing channels to reach gay and lesbian consumers.
That meant by the 1990s the start of directed targeted gay marketing by mainstream brands to reach gays and lesbians through the key available channels to market, being gay media and gay nightlife venues.
This started with alcohol brands and then broadened out.
Our Australian office utilized gay venues as well as lesbian and gay community groups and targeted gay market sponsorships all during the 1990s for a range of our client brands from industries as diverse as pharmaceuticals, banking and finance, telecommunications and technology.
Gay Market News has been covering recently the global decline in identifiable gay ghettos, and analyzing what that means for gay marketing initiatives today.
Now, as the availability of lesbian and gay nightlife marketing options shrinks, effective gay marketing demands a strategic insight into the lifestyles and consumer patterns of gay and lesbian markets in order to understand not just what to say to gay consumers, but where to say it.
This Boston Globe article sums up what is happening in the Boston market which is very similar to what is occurring in many other urban markets that Out Now tracks for our gay marketing clients. The author describes the experience many gay men in particular recall from their own experience of coming out for the first time by visiting a gay bar when he writes:
The Napoleon Club was a piano bar near Park Square that attracted theater students and older men who left big tips on small glasses of red wine. A few blocks away, Luxor was a video bar for younger guys; nearby were Buddies (all ages) and Chaps, a dance club where dressing conservatively meant keeping your shirt on. In other parts of town, there were Sporters, a friendly Beacon Hill dive, and Playland, a Combat Zone bar known for its sketchy clientele, banged-up piano, and year-round Christmas lights. In all, there were 16 gay bars in Boston and Cambridge, according to Pink Pages directories from 1993 and 1994.
Today, that number has been cut to less than half. None of the bars I've mentioned are still in business, and most of the city's seven remaining gay-every-night bars have sparse customers for most of the week. (Lesbian bars were never numerous to begin with.) The gay population may have political clout and the right to marry in Massachusetts, but it has fewer and fewer public spaces to call its own.
As Gay Market News has been reporting for some time, this sadly means fewer gay market nightlife options for lesbians and gay men.
But it also means there are many new gay marketing opportunities which need to be understood and harnessed by marketers seeking to tap into the lesbian and gay market niche.
When the market moves, you must move your marketing with it.
That means changing the fundamentals of communications and gay marketing strategies that were previously used to reach gay and lesbian consumers.
As the numbers of gay community venues shrink, seemingly paradoxically the visible and reachable gay community for marketers continues to expand -- thanks to a more widely geographically-dispersed gay market; and the widespread global gay marketing reach delivered by the internet.
The challenge for marketing today is to know how to best access this brave new gay marketing world, by knowing what to say to the market -- and very importantly where to say it.
For information and help with understanding how to reach gay market consumers and gay marketing communications strategies to more effectively meet the consumer needs of the lesbian and gay market, rely on the gay market experts, Out Now. Leading in the gay market since 1992.
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