Homosexual-themed Advertisement in Mainstream Media: Heterosexual Consumer’s Attitude Toward the Brand and its Social Impact

Abstract: Nowadays, consumers are daily exposed to an overflow of content in mainstream media. Many companies have developed a trend where they target different sexual orientations as separate segments in order to create a closer relationship to all consumers. However, when companies use homosexual themes in their advertising, it can be perceived as a sensitive area, especially when including minority groups. Although there are many beneficial reasons of implementing this marketing communication strategy, the number of heterosexual consumers in the mainstream audience is still significantly larger than the number of homosexual consumers, and their attitudinal response can have a big impact on for example the brand’s profit. This purpose of this study is to create a deeper understanding of the heterosexual consumers’ expressed thoughts and reactions toward homosexual-themed advertisements in mainstream media. Additionally, this study aims to examine if these responses influence heterosexual consumers’ attitudes toward the brand, and if homosexual-themed advertisements have an impact on the society, from a consumer perspective. This study has a qualitative approach, with in-depth interviews performed in Sweden. As stimulus, we used three different homosexual-themed advertisements seen on mainstream television. Several common themes emerged and showed a significant importance when analysing the attitude towards the advertisements, brand and brands as social influencers in the society. Another thing that was apparent was that brands were viewed as either responsibility takers or non-responsibility takers. Our findings concern the degree of attitude toward homosexual-themed advertisement, when and if this strengthens the relationship with the brand and if the companies are seen as responsibility takers when implementing this strategy. The results in this study suggest that it is vital to get to know all segment groups as it can bring a lot of, either positive reactions or negative reactions. The result should be of a great use for practitioners that deal with this marketing communication strategy in order to maximize the effect of their marketing efforts. Finally, the findings of this study is not representative for a larger population.