Posted on 12/09/2005 9:30:42 PM PST by SmithL
Money certainly talks. So does social and personal pressure.
Keep letting them know how disgusted you really are. Politics translates directly into economics, even if you chose not to boycott them - they still have serious matters of law and policy to consider.
I guess that I'm just not aware of who actually advertises in homosexual publications, other than the San Francisco Chronicle.
I agree with this statement, and those who immediately invoke faith just to make a contrary argument are neither defending their view nor serving the Lord in any way.
Gotta a source on that one?
I think you nailed it. Though there are some high-profile exceptions, gays and lesbians as a group are not as financially successful as married heterosexual people, are less able to buy $65,000 vehicles, and it's therefore not a cost-efficient use of Ford's ad dollar to advertise in gay and lesbian publications. They would do better to advertise in Town and Country, the WSJ, Forbes, various upscale local lifestyle magazines. This is a business decision for Ford and has nothing to do with ideology at all.
I've got a really silly idea:
They already do.
Took me a second there... heh heh!
Ford made a decision a few years ago to court the gay community as a market segment, and actually offered buying incentives such as a discount to gay buyers. One of the ads that American Family Association particularly objected to was a side view of the interior of a vehicle's front seats with the parking brake pulled up in such a way that it looked like an erect phallus.
As for the Gay Games, they are public displays of greased and pierced male bodies in Speedos and leather straps with all body hair removed by waxing, including the chest and underarms; the games are usually held in public venues where families pass by; and the obvious point of them is the partying and dissolving into orgy behavior as the day wears on. And of course, the posting of lots of grope'n'grab photos on web sites "celebrating" the event and gayness in general, contributing to the Big Lie that mindless promiscuity has no downside. It's a revolting spectacle that a corporation, as a publicly-owned entity, has no business sponsoring.
My guess is that shareholder influence has been as powerful as the AFA in putting a stop to this PC BS.
Actually, gays as a group have more disposable income, because of not becoming parents in nearly the same percentage as heterosexuals.
Personally, I'm glad to find out what kind of agendas various companies promote. Then I can use my God given discrimination to decide where to spend my hard earned money.
Per capita; that is true but the demographic group is so small that no company can truly justify targeting them with a group specific Ad strategy.
There are lots of sources that attest to that. If you're referring to the ole 10% figure, well Kinsey basically made it up. That's what happens when you select 25% of your study participates from prison inmates and make sure a lot of them are sex offenders.
Here are the figures from past studies. Nationally, it's about 2.6% for men and 1.1% for women.
http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/20010701/5/598
Time and Newsweek magazines, both in April 26, 1993 issues, reported on these sexual survey results released by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, scarcely a conservative bastion regarding sexual issues: "Of the [3,321 American] men surveyed, only 2.3 percent reported any homosexual contacts in the last 10 years, and only half of those -- or just over 1 percent of the total -- said they were exclusively gay in that period" (Newsweek, "Sex in the Snoring '90s," p. 55, emphasis added).
The London Daily Mail released last week what it calls `the most exhaustive survey ever conducted into British sexual habits.' The most stunning finding was that only 1.1 percent of British men said they were active homosexuals, a figure similar to the most recent American polls" (World magazine, Jan. 29, 1994, p. 9).
And this one has a whole smattering of surveys. General concensus seems to be about 2-4% of the population claims to be gay and somewhere around 8% of the population has had an experience but does not identify with being gay.
And I thought I could sneak one by, . . .
heh heh heh
Most of ALL.......
the filthy unions
The trend in marketing for the past decade or so is the aggregation of market niches. Markets are increasingly fragmented, due to the proliferation of media channels. The entire nation used to listen to three major networks every evening, all of which operated under tight broadcasting decency rules. Now, there are thousands of channels for advertising over tv, cable, satellite, radio, cellphones, computer pop-ups, direct mail, you name it; and the trend has been for companies to try to add up many small segments into an aggregate market share.
That said, there are also powerful Big Lie elements in the entire politicization of homosexuals into an official victim/special-interest group. One of those elements is the often-repeated Big Lie of Alfred Kinsey, who insisted that gays are 10% of the population, a number that recent research has turned out to be closer to 2.5% exclusive male homosexuals among men old enough or affluent enough to buy a new car and an even smaller percentage of exclusive lesbians among all women.
So what they thought would be a large niche has turned out to be smaller, and what self-respecting interior decorator or hairdresser would be caught dead in a Ford, anyway?
I agree. After Target dumped the Salvation Army last Christmas, a boycott was organized and Target's earnings for the "holiday" season were off 23% -- a huge amount and well worth the message sent. This year they are trying to make up to the Christian market by collecting Katrina donations to be handled by the Salvation Army, but it's just not the same thing as wanting to make a profit from Christmas but also turning away a charity specifically directed towards Christians who wish to remember the less fortunate by tithing while they shop.
Target's decision to drop the Salvation Army was said to have originated with gay Target managers (there are loads of gays in retail and merchandising) wishing to punish the SA for holding to its high moral standards which, like the Boy Scouts, do not approve of homosexual behavior.
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