How Subarus Came to Be Seen as Cars for Lesbians
The reputation isn’t just a stereotype—it’s the result of a calculated, highly progressive ad campaign launched 20 years ago.
How do you advertise a car that journalists describe as “sturdy, if drab”?
That was the question faced by Subaru of America executives in the 1990s. After the company’s attempts to reinvigorate sales—by releasing its first luxury car and hiring a hip ad agency to introduce it to the public—failed, it changed its approach. Rather than fight larger car companies over the same demographic of white, 18- to 35-year-olds living in the suburbs, executives decided to market their cars to niche groups—such as outdoorsy types who liked that Subarus could handle dirt roads.
In the 1990s, Subaru’s unique selling point was that the company increasingly made all-wheel drive standard on all its cars. When the company’s 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, health-care professionals, IT professionals, and outdoorsy types.
Then they discovered a fifth: lesbians. “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 woman,” says Tim Bennett, who was the company’s director of advertising at the time. When marketers talked to these customers, they realized these women buying Subarus were lesbian.
Interesting but I'm not sure I buy this anecdote.
When one Subaru ad man … proposed the gay-targeting ads in talks with Japanese executives, the executives hurriedly looked up “gay” in their dictionaries. Upon reading the definition, they nodded at the idea enthusiastically. Who wouldn’t want happy or joyous advertising?
