Fashion’s Steady Play for Gays

NEW YORK — In the “knees” version of its inspirational “body that you make” campaign aimed at women, Nike replaced copy that initially read “There’s a man out there who will say to me…” with “There’s someone out there who will say to me…” The idea was to make the national print and digital ads inclusive, without bias to sexual orientation or gender identity.

Over the past year, Gap Inc. has donated more than $100,000 to various groups that support the gay and lesbian community, including a $50,000 cash grant to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, $15,000 to God’s Love We Deliver and $15,000 to Health Initiatives for Youth.

And at Liz Claiborne Inc., the Mexx brand ran a full-page ad in Instinct magazine’s March issue and threw a shopping party with Instinct, hosted by fashion designer and former “Project Runway” player Daniel Vosovic, to celebrate the gay title’s fashion issue.

These activities, undertaken over the past 12 months or so, reflect the self-described efforts of three of the five fashion brands scoring a perfect 100 in the fifth annual Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. That number is up from four in 2005 and two in 2004. The index measures corporate inclusiveness and marketing outreach to the country’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender population, based on criteria established and evaluated by HRC, the largest GLBT lobbying group in the U.S.

Results for the fashion segment were disclosed to WWD ahead of the broader release of the index, slated for September.

All five of the fashion firms scoring 100, which also include Levi Strauss & Co. and Nordstrom, were accorded the maximum 15 points for engaging in appropriate and respectful advertising and marketing or sponsoring gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender community events or organizations. Levi Strauss’ marketing effort to this cohort is expanding to include a first-time commercial on Viacom’s 24/7 gay-targeted channel Logo. The campaign will begin in October and continue through December.

Fifteen fashion players among the 1,500 publicly and privately held companies evaluated by HRC were awarded points in five different categories this time around, and thus were rated on the CEI’s 100-point scale. Of the 15 fashion companies, 12 were accorded the maximum 15 points for their marketing and sponsorships, one fewer than the 13 firms so recognized in 2005. The dozen getting the maximum points for those efforts in 2006 were Recreational Equipment Inc. (which scored 85 overall); Federated Department Stores (80); Limited Brands (70); Reebok International (68); Lillian Vernon (55); Abercrombie & Fitch (50), and Donna Karan (45) as well as the five with perfect scores overall — Gap, Levi Strauss, Liz Claiborne, Nike and Nordstrom. The remaining three received zeros: L.L. Bean (which was rated 73 overall), J.C. Penney (50) and The Men’s Wearhouse (35).

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“We haven’t seen any falling away in terms of not advertising to the GLBT community,” Daryl Herrschaft, deputy director of HRC WorkNet, said of the fashion business. Rather, it appears the sector is in a holding pattern.

“The interest in gay marketing kind of waxes and wanes with the media cult,” observed Lee Badgett, director of research at the Williams Institute, a think tank devoted to sexual orientation policy, at the UCLA School of Law.

“They seem interested in the marriage issue, but not much else,” she continued. “There is potential to [better leverage] the economic force of the gay population.”

For example, Badgett said, with the increase in same-sex partners, more of those partners are buying homes together and making big-ticket purchases together. In 2004, there were 1,414,392, same-sex partners who reported living together in 707,196 U.S. households, with 47 percent of them, or 665,598, women, based on the most recent data available in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Those 1.4 million people represent a 19 percent increase in the number of same-sex partner households since Census 2000, when 1,188,000 were reported.

Fashion marketers, among others, who are vying for the attention of the country’s roughly 15.5 million gay men and women are addressing a group with buying power estimated at $641 billion and projected to rise to $674 billion next year, according to gay marketing specialist Witeck-Combs Communications and market researcher Packaged Facts. The buying power, or post-tax income, of these adults is forecast to reach $708.5 billion in 2008 and hit $744.6 billion a year later.

These income estimates are considered conservative, noted Witeck-Combs president Wes Combs, because beginning in 2000, the Census Bureau asked for data on same-sex couples but did not seek information from other kinds of GLBT households. The gay and lesbian cohort, which now accounts for about 6 to 7 percent of the country’s adults, is anticipated to increase by about 6 percent to approximately 16.4 million in 2009. Since 2000, Combs said, “The population has consistently grown larger, as the GLBT population has become more comfortable with self-identifying.”

Despite the impetus of these population and income trends, Herrschaft said, “there is still work to be done,” both in the realm of corporate America’s inclusiveness and the visibility of such efforts. To that end, American Airlines and Levi Strauss participated in an HRC press conference this summer to show their commitment to inclusiveness, while others have used the HRC logo in ads to publicize their high CEI ratings.

Among the handful of fashion players that scored 100 in the 2006 CEI, additional marketing and sponsorships aimed at a GLBT audience over the past year have included:

• Various Banana Republic brand campaigns in Out and Pride magazines, and a Gap Inc. sponsorship of the National Center for Lesbian Rights 28th Anniversary Gala.
• Levi Strauss’ sponsorship of the Hetrick-Martin Institute’s 2005 Emery Awards in New York and cash grants topping $100,000, including $50,000 for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education fund and $35,000 for the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.
• Nike’s cash grants of $30,000 to the Human Rights Campaign and $5,000 to Basic Rights Oregon, as well as sponsorship of a National Coming Out Day event at Nike’s world headquarters corporate campus.

“We don’t make a distinction between marketing to people who are gay, straight, black, white,” said Nike spokeswoman Morgan Shaw when asked for comment on the company’s GLBT marketing and sponsorship activities. Shaw also stated, “It’s a very segmented thing as to what [marketing activity] we choose to discuss.”

In contrast, a spokeswoman for Banana Republic said, “Banana Republic’s audience certainly includes a gay and lesbian following and advertising in certain publications is an important element of our outreach. We care about this audience in all aspects of marketing, including advertising, public relations, sponsorships and charitable giving. We are supporters of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and our executive vice president of marketing, Jack Calhoun, has been on the GLAAD board for the last four years.”

While acknowledging that its Mexx brand “has done some promotional activity geared specifically to gay consumers,” a spokeswoman for Liz Claiborne Inc. stated: “As a company, we don’t target gay consumers directly because we feel we reach this segment of the population through advertising in general media.”

Describing the current marketing climate as cautionary rather than evolutionary, Combs projected, “I think we’ll see more GLBT imagery mixed with heterosexual imagery in ads — like you’d see Asian, white and black people in an ad.” In addition, Combs said, “It’s expensive to totally target a niche market, so we often recommend to general audience clients to include a scenario that portrays gay people.”

The fashion sector’s average score of 74.1 in HRC’s 2006 Corporate Equality Index fell slightly below the average of 75 achieved by the 1,500 companies considered, an array HRC culled from the Fortune 1000, S&P 500, and Forbes’ list of the 200 largest privately held concerns. This year, a total of 100 points could be earned in five categories, while 15 points were deducted for actions seen as undermining GLBT equality.

For HRC’s first four corporate equality indexes, beginning in 2002, 14 points were given for not undermining equality. The decision not to award those points this year, Herrschaft said, was in part responsible for the decline in scores, compared with 2005, for eight companies grouped in the fashion segment: Federated, Limited Brands, Reebok, Lillian Vernon, Abercrombie, J.C. Penney, Donna Karan and The Men’s Wearhouse.

Two fashion companies, in contrast, won more points in 2006 than they did a year earlier: Liz Claiborne, which added 14 to score 100, and L.L. Bean, which added 16 to score 73.

A CEI score of 100 was achieved by a total of 130 companies this year, double the 65 that did it in 2005 and up from 56 in 2004. “Both inside and outside corporate America,” Herrschaft related, “there’s been a moving away from hot-button issues like marriage. The expectations of GLBT employees remains the same, but we’re talking about bereavement leave and COBRA benefits, rather than simply discussing same-sex partner benefits.

“The fashion sector is part of a national trend to expand policies and benefits to include gay and lesbian workers,” Herrschaft said. “Many of these companies have a welcoming environment for GLBT people and it is important for some of them to match policies with their [broader] environment.”