By Tom Flanagan
"Dear Executive: Do you want to expand your customer base with a highly affluent, well informed and extremely loyal niche market? ... How do you tailor your advertising campaign to the gay consumer without alienating your traditional consumer? ... Gay couples are your classic DINKies (Double Income No Kids), thus are part of the biggest spenders in the community ... Marketers can no longer ignore this lucrative yet largely untapped market ... Don't delay — BOOK NOW!"
These words are taken from a letter promoting a conference to be held in Sydney in late April. The registration fee for the conference, titled "Chasing the Pink Dollar", is $1395 for two days.
It should not surprise that businesses, driven to maximise profits, are interested in gay men and lesbians in direct proportion to their disposable income. Nor should it surprise that under capitalism, which tends to transform all things into commodities, even marketing strategies are marketed. What we should be wary of, however, is any uncritical acceptance of the notion that promoting lesbians and gay men as a niche market is beneficial to the targets of that marketing.
The Australian Graduate School of Management calculated that last year's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival, Parade and Party, injected $38 million into the economy. This fact is being used to convince businesses of the power of the "pink dollar", and to win sponsorship deals for Mardi Gras. Reports in the lesbian and gay press put the income from sponsorship deals at around $50,000, coming from the marketers of Kia Ora condoms and dams, United Distilleries Limited (UDL) and Freixenet champagne. These deals were negotiated by a consultancy firm for a fee reported to be around $20,000.
Mardi Gras president Susan Harben has been careful to point out that not all sponsors are welcome. Quoted in Sydney's Capital Q, she explained, "We have to protect the integrity of the events and that means we have suitable products. The primary focus of Mardi Gras is lesbians and gay men, it's not a brand of alcohol or a brand of clothing."
Sponsorship agent Barbara Bridges told the Sydney Star Observer that corporate Australia will take note of the impact of this years's low-level sponsorship, and that she expects the amount of sponsorship money to increase next year.
At the same time, the New Zealand Tourism Board has announced that it will be targeting lesbians and gay men in promoting a range of tour packages in the near future. According to a report in the Sydney Star Observer, the president of the Australian Gay and Lesbian Travel Association, Rod Stringer, sees the promotion, while driven by economic considerations, as a very positive development representing significant gains in terms of official recognition and visibility.
While this is true to a degree, there is a danger of being sold the notion that the promotion of lesbian and gay niche markets is a means of achieving lesbian and gay liberation. The pink dollar has a very limited power in this regard.
This society does not meet the needs of all its members, and this failure has nothing to do with ignoring niche markets. Capitalist economic imperatives, which exert an ever increasing influence on government policy, recognise only the needs of those who can pay. Marketing is not about meeting needs, but about finding the most effective way to sell products, regardless of whether the "need" for them is real or simply generated by advertising itself.
For an example of negative consequences of marketing, we need look no further than Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, which dramatically documents, among other things, the impact of much of the advertising directed at women. Presenting images of women that are unattainable for most mortals, this advertising exploits and promotes feelings of insecurity and inadequacy.
While marketing may promote a certain visibility and "respectability" for lesbians and gay men simply through recognising their existence, it will also be geared, as marketing, to manipulate and exploit. Since capitalist marketing tries to sell us products by identifying them with happiness and satisfaction in our lives, it necessarily devalues life without these products.
The pink dollar is already the target of many bars that charge too much for drinks, of landlords who charge exorbitant rents for inner city living space, of promoters of dance parties who charge phenomenal amounts for tickets.
Large numbers of businesses and enterprises that cater to the "scene" do very well out of the ghettoisation of a sector of the gay and lesbian community. They do well because they satisfy a need where prejudice, bigotry and violence against lesbians and gay men are such that we feel safer or more comfortable in our own venues, and in the inner city residential areas, even if we do have to pay more than we can afford for drinks, entertainment and rent.
Clearly, we will continue to be exploited by those who chase the pink dollar until we have a society which no longer tolerates prejudice, bigotry and violence, until we are no longer pressured to live separately from the mainstream. Such changes will come about only through militant political action, by building broad alliances, by changing society fundamentally.
This brings us back to Mardi Gras, which is expected to attract half a million people again this year. The growing sponsorship of Mardi Gras corresponds to an ongoing evolution away from the militant political march that began on the ninth anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
The politics of that march demanded acceptance of lesbians and gay men on our terms, rather than aspiring to become acceptable to the mainstream. Everyone appreciates the significance of Mardi Gras as a cultural event. But we also need to have a broader strategy that mobilises and involves people in the campaign for their own liberation. Clever marketing can't do it for us.