Marketing to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community isn’t as difficult as quantifying the market. That was one conclusion you could draw from the Reaching Out conference held in February by students at Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Yale School of Management.
During a panel discussion, Gary Osifchin, a brand manager at SC Johnson, talked about the difficulty in finding substantial market data about the audience. “You don’t have the typical data that you have for other targets,” Osifchin said, according to Julia Hanna’s article on the conference for Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge Website (hbswk.hbs.edu). “I know that in Glade aerosols I have a $2.2 million share gap opportunity among the Hispanic population of air freshener buyers and a $2.8 million opportunity among African American consumers. I can take numbers like that to management.”
Some creative thinking can help marketers work around the lack of hard numbers, said Matt Tumminello, president of the public relations and marketing firm Target Ten. He cited the example of Tylenol P.M. Travel and an urban environment are among the top causes of sleeplessness, he explained, and members of the LGBT community are more likely to travel and live in cities than is the population at large.
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