well we're going to start our next presentation and we're very happy again to to make sure that there were dress in the markets that really make up the population of this great school l g b t was was we thought was was not only a opportunity to highlight some of the students here but it's a great market it's a new market in very excited especially in the twin cities so to introduce our next presenter we've got our friend a member it's so critical that we're having these conversations and really taking a look at this market so i'm very excited again to introduce christine and she's the award winning marketer and founder of astra group of full service branding agency chris and her team handle strategy brand experience designing consumer engagement programs for leading brands her work is focused on transforming consumer to brand relationships through a deep understanding of culture market dynamics and trends partner dot com olivia and she regularly travels in percents new insights on creating affective and engaging campaigns in long term relationships with consumers thank you it and i really want to thank rick aguilar as well so this is a great format before i get started just a couple of things i'm a big social media bust if you wouldn't mind i'd love to take a photo of you good looking people so i can post this ago so i know this on my bullets don't look as pretty as they looked yesterday but that's ok you know that the other thing is i'm a tory is for having at least one typo in every presentation no matter how hard my team and i try so if you find the t o and it doesn't count for capitalization if you find it raise your hand i've got i've got it handy for you here so you can and then ok so today the goal of today's presentation is to really take  overview look and help develop a deeper understanding of us lesbian and gay consumers so what i'd like to do is do a little bit of what i call gay want to one just a little level setting of the segment a bit about the size some perspectives that we have and just some opportunities and things we should be thinking about right now in this in this environment we're lesbians and gays are a hot topic in politics and other things then i want to talk a little bit about just some of what's happening from a society point of view so you can understand sort of where where things are politically certainly and just some laws and things  one of the things i want to do today is has really shed some light and hopefully help you appreciate some of the experiences that separate the from the mainstream audience our general markets and this is a multicultural marketing cum conference so guiding strategic marketing and advertising is also paramount so just one other quick note about the nomenclature that i use in this i use the terms lesbian group in two thousand and two san francisco and we work with clients all over the u s canada and latin america we do a lot of general market work but one of the reasons that people call us is her specialty which is helping general market companies understand and develop strategies to build relationships with audiences i want to make it very clear we're not a gay advertising agency we try to help companies build relationships  audiences and relationship building starts with understanding who they are and then certainly we work with some what we call great companies which primarily serve the community so ok so you could see all this are ok that's a dense slide but i'm just going to break it down for you so l g week t consumers make up roughly ten percent of the u s consumer market and there's a little asterix there not to reinforce the name of our company but to just let you know that that number is a very difficult number to called coming out and therefore not everyone has raised their hand as an out adult and so we can't count them some of your raising your hands right now which is great  right me too and the other reason that it's a very tough to quantify is because of the us census data although in two thousand it was the first time that the us census started to ask a question which we  could start to extrapolate some numbers for size and then the past census as well it's not exact so there's not a question that asks are you lesbian gay bisexual or transgender on the census now so roughly about ten percent and we know that in terms of buying power l g b t tend more homes cars certainly travel a lot more and spend more on electronics and they have a large amount of disposable income per capita it's larger than any other niche markets and that doesn't necessarily mean because we're all making a lot more money it generally means that there are tend to be two adults in the household if you're in a couple and they tend to have less we tend to have less children at home which means we have more money to spend on things that are not kiddo related ok so total buying power of the adult us population is projected at seven hundred forty three billion this number has gone up and down especially with the economic downturn but essentially the buying power itself is commensurate with african american and latino combined although we know that ten percent is a sliver of the economy so it's a lot of buying power again often due to dual household incomes and it's well over the national average in terms of income over two hundred fifty thousand a year and also household incomes of one hundred thousand or more ok and so there's a lot of money there and that makes us very attractive to marketers one of the the sort of hallmarks of lesbian and gay consumers is that we tend to be an extremely brand loyal segment seventy one percent of was binns and gates said that they would be likely to remain loyal to a brand that they believe is very friendly and key word here supportive of the community and issues even if it costs more or if it's less convenient and one of the other things that we're noting right now is that it's meant is listening and they're watching right now to see where companies and cities and politicians fall in terms of support and believe me there's a very big difference between what was first coined gay friendly and gay inclusive and gay supportive so there's kind of a wide variety we're going to show you a couple case studies to talk about that and also just to mention i forgot to mention at the beginning of this some of the research in this presentation which you have in your cd and your bag much of it is based on a study that asterix group in new american dimensions you'll hear from david morse later today commissioned on our own and then peppered it in with some other recent stats and it's important to understand that why did we go and do our own study well because there's there's not a lot of of  benefits in fact in the studies that we've done new american dimensions in asterix group and the number one thing if you will action that a company can take to prove to an to consumers that they are on their side is to provide workplace benefits for same sex partners so and then that sort of falls into choosing health insurance as well eighty two percent so it's important that health insurance carrier provide domestic partnership coverage whether they're on that plan or not so just a little bit about some of the social dynamics that are happening now i will certainly say that the tea environment is you know discussions are lot more active than they were say even ten years ago one of the reasons is because a little thing in the media called ellen de generous when she came out on national television and that was over ten years ago now so in terms of what is really influencing and making impacts on the american landscape let's talk about media for a second well certainly ellen now so she has one of the top rated television shows and they tend television we've got shows like modern family and  gay characters and films like the kids are all right we're straight actors are doing a really good job playing lesbian characters i think socially and we're talking about what's happening legally and socially on the social landscape gay marriage legal right now in six states i say six plus because some are sort of on the fence right to california some have been married including me and it's been grandfathered in until the state figures out what direction they're going to go there's also a huge trend right now in what we calling and following and tracking as the gay baby boom so same sex partners having or adopting children so it's a really big thing and that has huge impacts in terms of school and just socialization of  sex couples who are legally married in a state but aren't federally recognized i'm telling you that my accountant had a heyday with my taxes two years ago because it's a complicated mess also some legal things that have happened is passing of the matthew shepard act which is the federal hate crimes act so that's at a national level that happened about two years ago and of course ending of don't ask don't tell that was a huge thing happening  increased outreach and something that we're calling sticking their neck out companies that are deciding to stick their neck out in support of issues things like marriage things like domestic partnerships benefits rather even if that means they're going to get experience some backlash starbucks recently came out on the side of marriage and j c penney of course has had a a campaign where they hired ellen to generous as her spokes woman and they have received some backlash at the same time that all of that is happening and l g b t people are becoming more visible in the conversation is becoming more and more about us it is still legal in twenty nine states to fire someone for being lesbian gay or bisexual and it is still legal in thirty four states to fire an employee for being transgender so there's a lot of long way to go let's see that quick  clip it let's go all right so all of that and of course the hand raisers people who self identify as gay that's one of the reasons that we're one of the fastest growing and most recognized us market segments and really there was sort of what i call a gay marketing boom which started in the early ninety's but since that time we've seen some maturing of that market so we're talking about a segment that's powerful that's very brand conscious that tends to be early adopters of internet behavior social media and technology and because of that early adoption they tend to be influential and trendsetters so it's a segment that includes gay men and lesbians of course and distinct within each and just like there is no single asian market as we just learned from saul there's no single market and we're going to talk about that in a few slides and one other thing that gay does not necessarily equal lesbian because there are a lot of gender differences as well so it makes it a big complicated segment to track and again because we typically have higher disposable incomes we tend to be more resilient consumers so  our spending on things like entertainment and going out to dinner etc through this economic downturn to state a bit more steady than the general market ok so we spend more freely we spend on ourselves because there are like i said the are a lot kiddos at home and spending through tough economies and generally speaking the segment tends to be educated very brand loyal as i mentioned before committed consumers leading full out in open lives there is a trend towards and i'll share that on a slide in a moment towards saying i am out and i'm completely fine with that i'm not in the closet anymore and then purchasing high quality and products and services so this i love this i'm going to read up here for a second but this is a quote from let's see a state senator in mississippi after the two thousand census where he someone came and told him that there were fifty five gay people in his hometown and he said surely you jest have never met any of these people so one of the things that we know is that as straight americans tend to meet more and more americans they realize that everything is ok in fact we're present in ninety nine point three percent of country counties in the u s and it's a demographic of course that crosses over obviously both genders and across ethnic lines so the tend toward marriage and forming families and doing all of this in the suburbs is also a trend that we're following so used to be san francisco los angeles chicago new york but now one of the top areas of density for lesbians is albuquerque new mexico and we've got places like berkeley and other suburbs so there's a trend there and th call the gay family value segment so in terms of increasing invisibility often times as you know marketers tend to do sort of a wide general market approach but let's just take a look at some of the women in the  in our purview now who identify with the segment let's see if anyone can name all of these women all right so we have lily tomlin i will go in a particular thank you adam lambert i still say doogie howser every time i see that which is aging me and john and his husband david furnish else who else is here the richest  in our leader lady gaga which the president of the united states likes to call her the leader of our people lady gaga right ok and ok so just this all said earlier there's no single asian market and there's no single ga market in fact gays and lesbians form a community of distinct segments that together represent a broader dynamic group with lots of various sensitivities preferences and attitudes and behaviors that's one of the things that we found so interesting from from our from our study in fact i want to just put this up for a second can you guys see that ok it's a little bit bright on my screen so in the study that asterix new american dimensions did we actually identified five distinct segments and i'm just going describe each of them and this is the names we gave to them closeted what we call habitat  the game main stream party people and a term we made up that's now all over the internet all over the internet in fact on t shirts called super gays and we were able to segment these groups by their wish statements so closeted which represents twelve percent of course tend to be the gays and lesbians that are still in the closet they their wish statement is they really wish to  lead an honest life not a double life and a habitat hers or an interesting group that's about twenty five percent and these are the folks that really wish to be out and with their family so these are the folks that are married they have kids they probably live in your neighborhood they have children that go to school with your kids so they're all about forming families the gaming stream which is a very interesting group we found about twenty three per cent of bt who self identify is kind of trying to blend in so they've got maybe one foot in the closet but one foot out as have a tatars but they tend to behave more like more more of a street segment  the party people who we love i think we've all been there as party people specially in college fourteen percent these are the folks that say i'm just here to party and i'm here for myself and i'm out and respect me for that well what happens with party people is that we notice that most advertising that's directed at the segment is directed at party people but they don't have all the money so they should be going to folks like the super gays and the habitat or as we have the money so the super gay causes so this slide is hard to read on the screen but it's broken down and it's in more detail on your cd but it gives you some more interesting sort of tidbits about how the segment the person is basically within the segment so again habitat hers party people super gays the highest in outness and the highest and perceived discrimination and the closeted folks they're almost completely in the closet and so they wish that they could be out  mainstream and habitat hers ok interesting stuff all right so going a little bit deeper as we looked at all of those segments or or or  slices within the segment all the personas with the exception of the closeted folks today's lesbians and gays tend to be open and honest about their sexual orientation and consider that an integral part of who they are in fact two thirds agree everyone knows i'm gay and sixty percent say i'm completely fine with that again ten fifteen years ago that would've been the same over seventy percent say that being gay is an important part of earlier and with the highest degree of outness on the other hand older parts of the segment are also just coming out the closet and staying at the closet where they didn't feel comfortable to do that years ago and then we took a look at stereotypes and discrimination and this is been of course a hot topic when you think about the epidemic of bullying that's been happening in schools and it's not just be to youth it's bowling in general but one of the things that we noticed was that nearly two thirds of gays and lesbians reported in our study experiencing stereotyping and discrimination and this feeling which was interesting was particularly prevalent among caucasians over african american and latinos that we we talked to and that might be because they feel more sensitive about that because they hadn't been discriminated or haven't felt the feeling of discrimination based on their ethnicity so also nearly two three quarters rather of gays and lesbians say they feel safer in a quote unquote gay neighborhood so safety is a is a really prevalent issue especially for  lesbians who feel unsafe with things like traveling invocations if they're outside of their sort of normal neighborhood and stuff so it's something to think about like all right there it is there's a second quick so  that's what i just said it's saddening at every age especially with the f epidemic of bullying that we've seen oh is it going wait a minute hold on ok let me go back want to make sure i didn't lose it ok all right and then we asked about what are you doing with all this high level of discretionary income that you have and are you investing it so  work with a lot of financial services companies and we wanted to understand a bit more about how are investing their money so it's higher then the general market in terms of savings in investing were forty percent invest in stocks  thirty six percent money market funds etc twenty five percent use financial planning services and in focus groups that we do we often hear that the financial planning aspect is of a higher concern for bt long term committed and married couples because there's there's less legal benefits and assurances that they'll be able to pass their wealth along to their partner so the financial planning becomes sort of a high priority and of  course besides the investment spending on things they enjoy sixty five percent identify as having to have the latest again that's where he tracked of to marketers who want to sell new things like i pods and i pads to them sixty eight percent have to upgrade to the latest latest model and seventy seven percent believe in indulging themselves all right ok and then we wanted to take a look at support for advocates and advocates kind of come into two areas one is general market companies that support community and also charities and groups like the human rights campaign and gladden and things like that so sixty percent indicate that they actively support the gay community with their time or money so the volunteer rate is very high in this as well as the check writers eighty one percent this is a huge number are more likely to buy for my company if it markets directly to them very very high so that's something that is it's a challenge for marketers because there are few places media outlets where we can advertise directly to the statement things like local papers and magazines and online things and then of course nearly seventy percent prefer t v that that includes a gay character but really who doesn't write so it's a fun part of the storyline and shows like glee cetera and the implication of all this is that communities are are trendsetters with the ability to help the market or  introduce new products and make or break the bottom line there ok so here's some of the the lifestyle trends that we are following every year my team and i we sit down we take a look at you know what are the top trends  what are the things that sort of based on the social dynamics that continue to affect us so these are the top six things that we're following user we have five we had a six so the number one thing is we're following is the trend of what i call a family values so that is about marriage increasing and that certainly is increasing with legalization across states and an increase in stay at home parents and a sincere commitment by one of the parents to leave the workplace in order to raise the children i know for a fact that several that's a situation with several of my friends and it's really exciting to see a second trend that we're following it's what we're calling the graying of the gays so of course the out population is getting older in line with the rest of america but it has very specific implications if you've lived with the same sex partner for twenty thirty forty years or more and now your options may be limited to you depending on where you live for retirement home and community so it's starting to become a trend that we're watching the retirement facilities have to address this and how to keep the couple together especially in states that are not supportive digital and social media savvy we know that the digital trends behaviors gadgets that has been high for a long time with and used to be hi one of the most fascinating things and recently we were talking to some folks over at american express about this is what we call the entrepreneurial edge twelve percent of communities are self employed so there are business owners or consultants and that's double the us average which is six percent overall style and design fanatics choose brands by name play of design in the community aspect of that which is true and then the staggering and it has been for some time fifty five billion and travel spending which is off the charts from the general market so the frequency and trips the level of stays  cetera so that's if your travel marketer we get a whole presentation just on that right see here ok and just a couple quick things on values and then i'm going to share a couple of examples of some advertising with you and then we'll move on to some questions in terms of values again in our study we found that gays are more likely to agree with statements like i'm a natural leader i'm influenced by what's hot and by what's  surprise that gays and lesbians are more likely to be politically uncivil clee civil civic leaders involved and that's not a surprise especially when a lot of the political climate house has to do with issues that affect their lives so seventy nine percent voted in last federal state or local election ninety two percent voted in the last presidential election etc and it's continues to be high on that ok and then before we talk about some of the current marketing just want to mention a couple of what we call the pioneer gay brands or gay iconic brands and some i can see some smiles out there one of the founded over thirty five years ago as a record label and over the years they evolved into travel and other things and they have staggering numbers about how many women have gone on a libya cruises or on a  resort so it's just a iconic and favorite brand in the in the women's community for sure absolute of course is known for being way out front lots of things absolute has done a lot of spending with the  community from from the early days of the gate marketing boom and a lot of that spending had to do with giving away a lot of free product at events and things like that and showing up at events and parties and what it did was it caused a lot of other vodka brands to come in the way can say i want a part of that share of the absolute pride dollars subarus a very interesting case study that several years ago through word of mouth lesbian started of they brought in a new v p of marketing and he was looking what is this what is this there are these pockets where subaru purchasing is is like astronomical with women and what is that all about without doing any marketing to lesbians in particular at the time they were still becoming these great brand fans and so since they found some of that out they went and they started dedicating some marketing dollars to them and it's been sort of a fun story to track and stat that just came out from a from another marketing firm called community marketing in california and it's interesting because it follows a trend that we're seeing in focus groups mainstream ads that are l g inclusive are earning the respect and attention of consumers so as as a brand and advertising marketer the biggest shift that i've seen in responses in focus groups with folks is that a few years ago what we would hear when we said how what's a best way to general market company can reach out to me we used to hear almost everyone say advertise to me in mob publications well that has really shifted to what we're following is advertised to me and show me  as part of the diverse landscape in your general market ads so that's one of the biggest now that's and then this study from community marketing really back that up and trying to read with the inclusive mainstream media is the fourth thing that marketers can do so show me as part of a diverse usa ok so let's talk a little bit i've got i think three examples i want to share with you and how my on time ok let's talk about j c penny for a minute they would know the story of j c penney what they've been going through lately ok so in a nutshell early earlier this year j c penney was doing a rebranding and as part of that rebranding they hired ellen de generous to be the company's spokeswoman which i thought was pretty a great move but that prompted outrage and backlash from the one million moms and i want to read you this quote because this  is their quote that they went out to to raise signatures and they said j c penney thinks hiring an open homosexual spokesperson will help their business when most of their come customers are traditional families the generous is not a true representation of the type of families that also shop at their store and majority of j c penney shoppers will be offended and choose to no longer shop there all right but that's not what happened at all instead what happened is over twenty two thousand people signed a petition to thank the retailer for their progress a stance and for not putting their head in the sand and firing the generous for no reason then in february this year there was a pink dollar flashmob the day when hear about the pink dollar flash mob all right this was really fun so shoppers all over the internet and all over j c penney retailers supported the brand at precisely going to say penney spokes person in the mean time ellen stayed pretty quiet she said a couple things on her show but she tried to stay on the fray while the community took over so let's see if this is going to play we're going to try this just just a few for fun to give you a sense and this goes on and on and on and on but if you can imagine shoppers flooding the j c penney website to show support for the store and instead of people not spending money at j c penney they have a lot of people spending a lot of money and to see penny and having a pretty good time doing it too so it just gives you a little chance of what was there all right ok and then it kept going so this past mother's day which was just a few weeks ago j c penney in their mother's day ads included a lesbian family and their daughter there's the the point of this ad was to show different types of families so you have an older mom with a daughter and then on the right side you have a lesbian family with their daughter and j c penney so proud of them said we want to be a store for all americans so in celebration of mother's day we're proud that our may book honors women from diverse backgrounds who all share the heartwarming experiences of motherhood so that's just a little bit about what's going on in general market companies supporting bt all right let's switch gears to travel for one second so how many of you know kimpton hotels are right we're big fan of canton hotels so one of the things that we find when we talk to clients is sometimes they want to start an l g b t marketing program in the first thing we say is well do  where their customers can sort of self identify what their interests are so they use this as an opportunity to ask who would be interested in gay and lesbian travel or gay and lesbian promotions and they also asked are you interested in friendly programs earth earth care wind dining i probably would check off all of these on here except for the kimpton residences but that's how they were able to figure out who the segment was and they had an overwhelming num they've got a fan base that they can market to year over year it generates over just the market program an additional five million dollars a year which is probably not a lot but that's five million to the whole bottom line that it's five million dollars they wouldn't have had otherwise and they have a fiercely loyal customer base that stays with them over and over again so are alive thirty five to one so that's pretty good ok too just two more quick stories i want to talk a little bit of a marketer too bad woman doesn't exist anymore they were great client of ours for several years but this is a case study  where they were already spending heavily hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing and sponsorship and millions of dollars in advertising just to the segment and they were really known as a sort of a trailblazer but the problem was despite all this money that they were spending they weren't getting any credit back from the consumer themselves they weren't recognizing it so what we did was we went in and took a look at what they were doing how they were marketing what we discovered is that they were spending money on sponsorships and they were spending money on advertising but they didn't have strategies to actually build a relationship with the consumer so we went in and we reorganize their strategic plan we actually help them save some money in the process of doing it our focus groups we ask them like we do normally what can we do to help you understand what they're doing in the market so we developed a campaign that more specifically spoke to them so two things we did it's hard to see this on here but on the right hand side what you'll see was we created advertise print advertising and some radio advertising that actually spoke separately to  y males and to lesbians so we actually took the next step and spoke to people directly in their language the next thing we did was we did we sort of added the l g b t message along with the general market message at this time they would just launch the woohoo campaign and so the brand was trying to move to more friendly inclusive casual and we said well if you want to really reintroduce yourself to americans let's go right to their inside fun friendly discussion our language that we used and it worked really well it got them noticed and then our print ads were things like finally a bank that's on my side and we talked about what i was doing specifically for l g b t americans so it was recognized in the most important thing is that we went from when we researched it from low awareness not even on the word our to the best bang for gays and lesbians when we reported eighteen months later right ok and what i want to do i want to end with an example of a major marketer google i mean if you heard of google and what they're doing so several months ago google launched chrome their browser and as part of that they decided for one of the first time they were going to run television ads so the group chromed team to come up with stories for what those ads b they want to talk about how chrome expand your life on the web basically so they went in and they looked at the people who are actually using chrome and the suite of google tools and what they were using it for and the group chrome team came upon this story from dan savage and this is what they put together he was using it for the it gets better campaign ok let's play this one there are so many things i love about that spot but one of the things that i wanted to share with you is how a general market mainstream brand and company was sending a great example in their mainstream advertising of how we as a company were including people and they did it in a way that was honorable and respectful and all the people were you saw folks of all kinds of the diversity landscape to show you and share just a few different examples so it's just a couple concluding thoughts just remember that gays and lesbians are fiercely brand loyal and we're paying attention right now to what companies are doing what politicians are saying the see who supports us and puts their neck out if you really want to be admired by consumers your marketing must be relevant a motive customized and as we're finding out appear in both gay specific and traditional media much like what we did with you and what google did and a fascinating stat don't be afraid of marketing to gays and lesbians because eighty one percent of americans do not care if a company whose products they use also promotes those products to gays so that's great news and therefore brands should not be fearful about reacting to public sentiment and instead start a dialogue and start building for myself and from the folks that i talk about talk with i think i would be overwhelming hand razors yes response on the other hand i know that one of the things that that we can see with with other segments and other niche groups like latino for instance there there will be some where there's a certain amount of fear about privacy or you know if you live in a small town and you want to identify as gay you don't know if you're male man who doesn't know will somehow find out from how you feel that the census so i think that the the hand raisers would far outweigh the closeted folks and i say yes yes yes  census forms when we did in that says we want to be counted and people did that in droves and a lot of people took pictures and posted on their facebook and all kinds of social media to say this is what i did you should do it too so that we a great question and one of the things we were talking about last night in the in the reception because at some point you know we're all a myriad right and we all bring our experiences and our culture  to every experience our decisions one thing we know as i mentioned that the gays and lesbians that we talk to want to see themselves as part of the whole spectrum so when you you can sort of  for folks they identify first by their gender and second by their ethnicity generally speaking and then by orientation so we thought that was pretty fascinating i don't know if that's going to help marketing that you do but that might be a good question for the panel later on and  know yes they did that so they didn't do that on house they hired some experts to help them break through but what was great about absolute is that since they started they've been completely committed and year over year they do