Many of them even felt an affinity with the name. (In a line some women may not like as much, marketers also said Subaru’s dependability was a good fit for lesbians since they didn’t have a man who could fix car problems.) “They felt it fit them and wasn’t too flashy,” says Poux. 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. “There was such an alignment of feeling, like fit with what they did,” says Paul Poux, who later conducted focus groups for Subaru. When Subaru marketers talked to these customers, they realized these women buying Subarus were lesbian. “When we did the research, 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 women,” says Bennett. When Subaru marketers went searching for people willing to pay a premium for all-wheel-drive, they identified four core groups who were responsible for half of the company’s American sales: teachers and educators, healthcare professionals, IT professionals, and “rugged individualists” (outdoorsy types). In the 1990s, Subaru’s unique characteristic was that the company increasingly made all-wheel-drive standard on all its cars. “I’m always amazed that no one copied it.” Instead of fighting every other car company over the same demographic of white, 18- to 35-year-olds living in the suburbs, Subaru would target niche groups of people who particularly liked Subarus. “That was and still is a unique approach,” says Tim Bennett, who worked as Director of Advertising. After attempts to reinvigorate the company’s declining sales with a sports car and a hip, young ad agency failed, they turned to their niche marketing strategy.
That was the question faced by Subaru of America executives in the 1990s. How do you advertise a car that journalists describe as “sturdy, if drab”? It’s that Subaru cultivated its image as a car for lesbians-and did so at a time when few companies would embrace or even acknowledge their gay customers. If you’ve ever wondered why people joke about lesbians driving Subarus, the reason is not just that lesbians like Subarus. It was such an unusual decision-and such a success-that it pushed gay and lesbian advertising from the fringes to the mainstream. Yet Subaru decided to launch an ad campaign focused on lesbian customers. A Democratic president had just passed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and after IKEA aired one of the first major ad campaigns depicting a gay couple, someone had called in a bomb threat on an IKEA store. Did the company want to make advertisements for gay customers? At the time, in the mid 1990s, few celebrities were openly out.
But Subaru had been looking for niche groups like skiers and kayakers-not lesbian couples. This was the type of discovery that the small, struggling automaker was looking for. Lesbians liked their dependability and size, and even the name “Subaru.” They were four times more likely than the average consumer to buy a Subaru. This search for niche groups led Subaru to the 3rd rail of marketing: They discovered that lesbians loved their cars. Rather than compete directly with Ford, Toyota, and other carmakers that dwarfed Subaru in size, executives decided to return to its old focus on marketing Subaru cars to niche groups-like outdoorsy types who liked that Subaru cars could handle dirt roads.
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The new approach had fallen flat 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?”Īfter firing the hip ad agency, Subaru of America changed its approach.
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. It was the mid 1990s, and sales of Subaru cars were in decline. Subaru’s marketing strategy had just died in a fit of irony.