Our friends at Community Marketing Inc. have this summer released the first Gay Consumer Index and Lesbian Consumer Index, comprehensive new national surveys that provide greater detail than has ever been available before about the depth, breadth, interests and concerns of gay and lesbian consumers.
Earlier this summer, before CMI hired us to provide media outreach in support of the survey release, Tom Roth of CMI gave us an opportunity to preview the gay survey results and then provide a brief commentary on its meaning and relevance. With the release of the survey press release today, we thought now would be a good time to share this commentary with you – it’s reprinted below.
We encourage you to check out the survey on the Community Marketing Inc. Web site and then come back to give us your comments on what the survey means and the impact it might (or should) have on marketers and communicators seeking to reach gay and lesbian consumers.
Analysis of the Gay Consumer Index Results
The CMI Gay Consumer Index is an impressive resource which should prove to be useful in defining who we are, what motivates us and how we interact with brands, the political system, each other and the broader world around us.
One of the mantras of our business at Fleishman-Hillard is that the LGBT community is “powerful, loyal and untapped.” I hope that the research results included in the Gay Consumer Index will help increase awareness of the first two attributes and help us retire use of the third. Unfortunately, despite many good efforts to educate marketers about the powerful loyalty of our community, current marketing and communications efforts to engage gay men (and all LGBT people, actually) are still only scratching the surface in comparison to the more mature efforts aimed at other specific audience segments.
Here’s what I mean:
The travel and tourism industry, the automotive industry, the financial services industry, the luxury goods market and others advertise to our community and many of us can name a half-dozen companies that have become known for their gay-positive ads. However, full-fledged communications efforts that match ongoing engagement with our community via events, marketing, media outreach, online outreach and engagement, sponsorships and related tactics are not nearly as common.
Why does this matter?
Because the gay community is comprised of skeptical consumers who expect and demand more than “just” advertising from the companies that want our dollars. We expect honest, direct and “real” engagement in and with our community. That means companies looking for gay business (and LGBT business too) must understand that merely telling us you want our business is not enough: you must show us that you understand what motivates us, what brands reflect our lives (and why) and what activities interest us. And that means you must fully engage in reaching us to tell your story in ways that will lead us to buy your product or begin to think differently about your corporate reputation.
The Gay Consumer Index provides lots of rich data about our consumer habits and many marketers may be tempted to conclude that simply engaging our wallets is all that is required to win us as customers. That’s not my conclusion. For me, the key takeaway is that the path to our wallets runs right through our hearts and minds. The bar has been raised, and we’ll only continue to spend our growing capital with those marketers that understand this fact and react accordingly with real engagement and activity in our community and with us as individuals.
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It is vital that marketers gain a better understanding of LGBT consumers, and surveys such as this can help with those efforts. It is important to note, however, that the respondents in this survey were not a random probability sample. As the press release from Gay Community Marketing notes:
“Survey participants were solicited through over 75 widely distributed internet and print publications. These media partners contributed their survey participants into Community Marketing’s own proprietary survey panel developed since 1994, which includes respondents from many other leading event and media companies such as Advocate Magazine, OUT Magazine, Instinct Magazine, Curve Magazine, Gay.com, PlanetOut.com and GayWired.com.”
These are consumers who have the wherewithal to have Internet access and subscribe to magazines. This likely means there is a bias towards higher-income couples vs. the LGBT population as a whole. Fine if the survey data is going to be used to target the higher-income LGBT consumers who read these magazines. Not so good when one considers that ENDA opponents used the LGBT community’s supposed wealth as evidence of “privilege” that negated any need for (in their words) “special rights.” Let’s hope the mainstream media doesn’t pick up on this survey and skew the interpretation of its results in a way that works against us.
Dana, thank you for reading this post and for taking the time to comment. I enjoy your blog (www.mombian.com) and hope our readers will take the time to check it out.
You make an interesting point, but I disagree with your assumptions and conclusions. Several of the media sources involved in promoting this survey were local LGBT weeklies, many of which are available free of charge. While access to the Internet was required to take the survey, CMI has done surveys in the past that show as much as 90% of the community has access to the Internet. No survey is perfect, and the unique attributes of our community (the closet, lack of access to resources for some of us) make reaching all of us even more of a challenge. CMI has more than 15 years of experience in conducting consumer surveys and they have a good handle on how to reach us to glean this kind of valuable information.
As for your point about the impact of the survey, I believe knowledge is power. While there is always a chance that mainstream media (or others) will misunderstand data, facts or other information, I believe these kinds of surveys are vitally important to helping us demonstrate our power. As I said in my first post on this blog last October, I believe our impact as consumers can and will have a positive, long-lasting impact on how we are perceived as a community. In many cases, our first hurdle as communicators is demonstrating that we exist and why that matters. Surveys such as this one go a long way toward making that case in a way that makes it hard to ignore our power as a significant audience.
You can read more about the CMI survey methodology on their Web site (www.communitymarketinginc.com).
Study: A Visa-sponsored dog show on NBC would be a hit with the gays
Community Marketing Inc. has released a new Gay Consumer Index, wherein they have outlined the habits of the queer population. Some of the more interesting findings: *Visa was the most popular credit card cited, with 80% of gay men and
First to Dana.
This survey was sent to every local GLBT publication throughout the publication several times – URGING the publishers to participate to create a fair representation of the country. There were many publications that did participate from C and D counties but would you know the names of them if we said them? Probably not. You do know the names of Advocate and Curve, which provides instant credibility and identification to the survey.
The mistake Community Marketing did was they listed all National Publications when this survey was dominated by local publications. But again, when was the last time you heard of Out Front?
Ben, a few corrections.
ALL gay local publication is free. The reason that the reader was directed to the Internet was two fold. It was quick, efficient. Second, there is a preponderance of long-standing research that shows the GLBT community has a high propensity to use the Internet. To that point, there that is why strategic reason the execution was chosen.
You are correct, no research is perfect. In fact, the minute the research is tabulated – it’s old.
But what the survey was created to do, it did.