Every Pride season, the same question lands in a budget meeting somewhere: is showing up for the LGBTQ+ community still worth it? For a few years now, the people asking have been working mostly from gut feeling and boycott headlines. As of this week, they have something better — actual numbers. And the numbers are not subtle.
On June 17, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation released its Pride in the Marketplace 2026 consumer report, built on three decades of research from Community Marketing & Insights (CMI). The same day, CNBC put the findings in front of a mainstream business audience. The takeaway that should stop every marketer mid-scroll: companies perceived as retreating from inclusion are losing LGBTQ+ customers at roughly twice the rate of everyone else.
The Headline Number: 7 in 10
This is a $1.4 trillion U.S. consumer bloc — more than $3.9 trillion globally — and it is paying attention. According to the HRC Foundation report, when LGBTQ+ consumers believe a company is pulling back on its commitments:
- 71.5% buy fewer products from that company.
- 69.4% refuse to purchase from it at least some of the time.
- 69.5% increase spending with businesses they see as genuinely supportive.
- 65.0% intentionally steer their dollars toward brands committed to inclusion.
Roughly seven in ten, across the board. That’s not a vocal fringe registering displeasure — that’s a majority of an enormous market quietly rerouting its spending. And compared with non-LGBTQ+ shoppers, LGBTQ+ consumers were more than twice as likely to both refuse purchases from and buy less from companies seen as backing away, and nearly twice as likely to actively reward the ones that stayed.
The Part Everyone Skips: This Is About Perception
Here’s the line in the report I’d underline twice, because it’s where the real strategic insight lives: these findings are rooted in consumer perception — not necessarily a company’s full record, internal policies, or long-term commitment. As HRC’s own report puts it, in many cases the greatest opportunity isn’t doing more work internally; it’s closing the gap between the work a company is already doing and what consumers actually understand about it.
Think about what that means. A brand can be quietly maintaining its commitments, keeping its benefits, supporting its employee resource groups — and still get filed under “retreating” simply because it went silent. To a watching community, reduced visibility reads as a retreat from values. The market doesn’t grade your intentions. It grades the signal it can see.
This is exactly the dynamic we wrote about in “DEI Goes Dark: Why ‘Stealth Inclusion’ Is Growing — and Why Visibility Still Wins.” Going quiet to avoid the noise isn’t a neutral, safe choice. It’s a choice that consumers can see, and now we have the data showing how they respond to it.
The Brands Being Watched
The report names names — carefully, and worth repeating with the same care HRC used. Respondents most often associated Target, Walmart, Amazon, Chick-fil-A, and Home Depot with perceived reduced support. On the other side, Costco, Apple, Ben & Jerry’s, Delta, and Kroger were cited most for increased support, and Costco, Apple, Starbucks, Delta, and Subaru ranked highest for perceptions of authentic, long-term inclusion.
HRC is explicit that this is a snapshot of perception, not a verdict on any company’s overall record. But perception is the whole game in marketing, and the pattern is hard to miss: the brands earning loyalty aren’t necessarily the loudest. They’re the ones consumers believe are showing up consistently, communicating clearly, and aligning what they do with what they say.
The backdrop makes the contrast sharper. As CNBC noted, participation in HRC’s Corporate Equality Index among Fortune 500 companies dropped from 377 in 2025 to 131 in 2026. A lot of companies are stepping back from the public scorecard at precisely the moment consumers are paying closest attention. We mapped that same split — the brands doubling down versus the ones running away — in our 2026 brand breakdown.
What This Confirms — and What It’s Personal About
None of this is a surprise to anyone who has been doing this work for thirty years. After the Bud Light and Target double boycotts of 2023, a lot of companies looked at the pressure and said, “Whoa, let’s slow down.” The fear was real. But the assumption underneath it — that pulling back is the cautious, low-risk move — was never actually tested against the cost of disappearing. This report finally puts a price on that side of the ledger, and it’s steep.
I’ll say plainly what the data circles around: when a brand treats our community as a risk to be managed, the community feels it. For us, this isn’t a quarterly line item — it’s our lives, and it’s personal. We don’t have the option of pulling back, stepping into the closet, and waiting for a calmer year. What the HRC numbers show is that the community isn’t waiting either. It’s spending accordingly, in both directions, and it’s keeping receipts.
The Opportunity Hiding in the Data
Read past the warning and there’s real opportunity here, especially for brands willing to be deliberate about it. While some companies talk themselves out of showing up this year, the field has gotten less crowded — which means the brands that do engage with intention are capturing outsized trust and share of voice precisely because fewer competitors are in the space.
And the smartest move isn’t a louder one-month rainbow logo. It’s authentic, year-round engagement that reaches the LGBTQ+ community where it actually lives — broader yet more targeted than mass-market spending, and consistent enough that the community never has to wonder where you stand. That’s the throughline in our 2026 LGBTQ+ Marketplace Guide, and it’s the case we made when the $1.4 trillion figure first started circulating in this piece.
Where Pink Media Stands
The HRC Foundation report and CNBC’s coverage land on the same conclusion we’ve been making for years, now backed by hard data: authenticity and consistency build community trust, and that trust converts into spending. Companies that close the perception gap — that let consumers actually see the commitments they’re keeping — earn loyalty that compounds for decades. Companies that go quiet get read as retreating, and lose ground at twice the speed.
If you’re working through how your brand should show up — and how to make sure the community actually sees it — that’s a conversation we have every day, and we’d welcome it. You can always reach us through PinkMedia.LGBT.
Authentic LGBTQ+ engagement, 24/7, 365 days a year — that’s what Pink Media: A Company With Influence is built for.
Sources: Human Rights Campaign — “New Data: Companies Viewed as Retreating from Inclusion Risk Losing LGBTQ+ Customers at Twice the Rate of Other Consumers” (June 17, 2026) · CNBC — “Target, Walmart and Amazon among brands losing LGBTQ+ consumer spending, new survey says” (June 17, 2026).
