ILoveGay.NET

LGBT people are an interesting target group, which should be on the radar of almost every company, and therefore every marketer, as part of “Diversity”. Also read my article “4 reasons to put your diversity into practice + 2 bonus reasons”. But who are we talking about here, and what do we call them?

LGBT+

Not long ago I wrote the article Marketing the Rainbow: transgenders as a target group. In it I showed that for decades transgender people have been appearing in commercials or print ads – actually much more often than you would expect, and not specifically aimed at that (very small) target group, or even the entire LGBT+ community.

However, I made the mistake of calling them “transgenders” and was reprimanded by people in the community. Transgender is an adjective, so if you say “A good time to take a look at transgenders in commercials” it means something like “Just look at blondes in commercials”. Thanks to the editors, I was able to correct most of the mistakes in the article, except in the headline, because it was already fixed ‘due to SEO’ – but I now know better. As an important source for my article, I had taken info from Wikipedia, and it turned out that there were no fewer than 19 errors of this type. So I just updated Wiki as well.

In English you can just talk about gays in plural: “a gay” is not possible, while for “lesbian” singular and plural are possible.

Alphabet soup

The LGBT community (which was once called ‘just’ gay men and women, then gays and lesbians) has recently been particularly busy with pigeonholing and fragmentation. About 20 years ago, the T was added to the LGB out of solidarity for a group that is so small that it would not have a meaningful platform on its own – even though their ‘problem’ was fundamentally different from that of the LGB. Solidarity, in other words, and it was the case before, because fair is fair: gays and lesbians lead very different lives, have a different consumption pattern, are not attracted to each other: in short, if there had been no – especially – political reasons to unite that had not happened.

Solidarity

However, there are more and more colors in society and in our community, and with the advancing emancipation some people no longer felt represented by “LGBT”. For a while, a “+” was enough to include them too, but alas. It started with the I of Intersex, indeed not LHB or T. But +. So no: this small group (about 0.4% of the population) had a lobby that ensured that for instance the Dutch governmental organizations switched to LGBTI (usually without +).

NB: Intersex was one of the 56 (!) identities made available on Facebook in 2014: to be honest, they went way too far to show their D&I, but now no one could feel left out.

Then the queers got a bit rebellious – after all, these used the more militant LGBT people. Although they almost always fall under any of those letters, they still wanted to see the Q added. In the present Age of Millennials, more and more members of the community call themselves queer, without adhering to the militant aspect it used to carry. Q can also mean Questioning, so that adds even more confusion. For years Toronto Pride was called LGBTTIQQ2SA as an abbreviation for their Pride Festival (see main image above). And there are more letters that have double meanings.

The steering committee of my last client is called LGBTIQA+. When I was invited to participate, I told them that the letters were a bit ‘much’, but I was happy to see the A because I think “Allies” is one of the most important groups when it comes to support and voice. But no, I misunderstood: that A stands for Asexual (it could also have meant Aromantic, I kid you not). Read my blog about the rest of the letters.

My point is: the alphabet soup is bubbling, growing and blooming, and we don’t understand it ourselves anymore. In the meantime, we deny pigeonholing and reject labels, but we do expect society to understand us. I am an advocate of LGBT+. That’s all folks.

Alfred Verhoeven is a marketer and is in the final phase of his PhD research Marketing the Rainbow. He previously wrote for ILOVEGAY about M&M’s causes Chinese supremacy and lesbian invasion,  Marketing the Rainbow: the process and all that came before it, Sport and (un)sportmanship,  Why you need a supplier diversity program, BeNeLux LGBTIQ+ Business Chamber (BGLBC), From B2C and B2B to B2G and G2G (oh, and G2C), The Men from Atlantis, The other kind of cruising, Booking.com, Home Deco, Haters and trolls: the ‘letter to the editor’ of the 21st century, 5 Bizarre LGBT Videos, TRANSparency, Transgender persons as a target group, Matchmaking, 5 videos that went viral, From Representation To Respect, Cultural sensitivities and social involvement in marketing, 4 reasons to practice diversity and The Rules of Market Segmentation.