Post-Gay and Empowered: The Implications of the Gay Generation Gap on Queer Consumers' Advertising Experience

With the rapidly changing attitudes towards the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT+), or Queer community, mainstream brands are increasingly targeting this subculture with explicit, gay-inclusive advertising. Recent... [ view full abstract ]

With the rapidly changing attitudes towards the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT+), or Queer community, mainstream brands are increasingly targeting this subculture with explicit, gay-inclusive advertising. Recent work suggests that existing marketing literature and practice is biased in its understanding of this community as a marginalised subculture, and its treatment of sexuality as an all-embracing segmentation variable. Sociologists and Queer theorists have pointed to a significant generational gap between ‘post-gay’ millennial consumers - Queer-Ys - and an older generation, shaped by the constant fight against stigmatisation. Expanding on this literature, this study combines focus groups with netnography, to explore the implications of this gap for the advertising experience of Queer consumers. It finds that older consumers online exhibited highly positive emotions, confirming previous studies’ findings. Queer-Ys’ advertising experiences, on the other hand, were markedly different. Instead of favourable emotions, participants displayed a strong inclination to refuse portrayals. They admonished ads for reducing them solely to their sexuality, tokenising and ridiculing Queer minorities. These feelings were mediated somewhat by participant’s levels of gay identity. They expect corporations to acknowledge, accept, and reflect diversity. Based on the findings, several avenues for further research and managerial practice are proposed.