Pride And Prejudice: Is It Time Big Business Did More For The LGBT Community?
Global brands have the power to instigate genuine change — so it’s high time they stopped hiding behind the rainbow

The year is 1994. Nelson Mandela has been inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president. Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece Schindler’s List has just scooped seven Oscars. And in case you forgot, a middle-aged man went shopping for a table with his partner.
This particular shopping trip, aired during a 30-second television advertisement in the United States, might not immediately sit at the forefront of 94’s greatest moments. But it should do. As this was the birth of big-time LGBT advertising.
While other brands had toyed with LGBT campaigns, Swedish furniture giants Ikea were arguably the first to make a gay couple the centrepiece of a big-budget TV ad.
It’s an advert that’s aged wonderfully well if you exclude the abhorrent tagline at the end. A normal, middle-aged couple appear relaxed as they discuss buying a new dining room table. It’s slick, endearingly cheesy and, as 90s US advertising goes, relatively natural — there’s nothing contrived or patronising about it.
As we reach the 25th anniversary of that Ikea ad, it feels like a good time to take stock of how far big brands have come when it comes to LGBT representation and promotion. They’re certainly doing more of it — but does quality always match quantity?
The likes of Adidas, H&M and Unilever have all put their names to some incredibly creative LGBT campaigns over the past 18 months. From rainbow-coloured trainers with the three-stripes, to the Swedish fashion brand’s use of Caitlyn Jenner to front their sportswear campaign — inclusivity has been a key theme behind the advertising spends of some of the biggest names in the business.
Inclusivity may well be a core ethos for big brands, but it’s clearly not the driving force. That would of course still be profit. According to LGBT Capital, the global aggregated spending power of the LGBT consumer base sits at around 5 trillion USD.
While the work done by many brands on promoting inclusivity has played a part in changing social attitudes, this work hasn’t necessarily been cultivated through a want to make the world a better place. It’s been driven by bottom line and cold, hard cash.

Pushing profits and social boundaries don’t usually go together. So it’s perhaps unsurprising there’s now a feeling that some brands are simply paying lip service to the LGBT community rather than truly striving to represent it.
Speaking to Campaign last year, Asad Dhunna, director of communications at Pride in London, points to a 2016 Lloyds Bank ad that had some glaring holes in it, to say the least.
A man takes to one knee during the commercial to propose to his partner. But instead of any remotely authentic showing of emotion, the camera cuts straight to another scene.
“It seems odd that a couple will hug and not kiss in that situation. I can just see the advertiser getting cold feet and deciding ‘Ooh, the same-sex couple can hug, maybe not kiss’,’' Dhunna said.
A bizarre and offensive alternate advertising reality, where LGBT couples live in a sterile harmony maintaining zero physical contact, is hardly helping brands reach out to the community. But it’s perhaps the tokenism of corporations doing the bare minimum to cash-in on the LGBT market that’s really doing more harm than good.
Grindr’s vice president of brand partnerships and advertising, Michelle Tobin, hit the nail on the head when speaking at SXSW earlier this year.
“I find the bare minimum pretty frustrating, when brands just slap a rainbow on their bottle or wave a rainbow flag during pride, and then call it a day, [or feel they] checked that box,” she said.
“Because surprise, surprise, people are gay all year round and continue to need to buy laundry detergent, and diapers, and clothing, and cars.”
The theory of naff tokenism turning off consumers isn’t just conjecture, either.

As reported in Fast Company, a survey by INTO, Grindr’s digital magazine, and market-research firm Brand Innovators, found only 15.6% of over 4,000 LGBTQ respondents felt ‘very positively’ about companies rolling out Pride-themed ad campaigns and then proceeding to do nothing else.
To quote Gerry Graf, founder and chief creative officer of Barton F. Graf 9000 when he spoke to the same publication, it feels a little depressing to think how much time has passed since that Ikea ad.
‘You would have hoped that showing a gay couple wouldn’t have been a big deal today. Apparently attitudes haven’t changed much in 20 years,'’ he said.
One of the things that make this achingly slow progress so depressing, is the sheer power of global corporates.
Not all of them should be demeaned as social pariahs — it would be silly to suggest we’ve not made any progress since 1994. Although it feels difficult to backslap huge businesses when we know full well they could inject a shot of adrenaline into LGBT equality efforts at the click of a finger.
Coca-Cola is perhaps the greatest example of the migraine-inducing inconsistency big corporates harness in their LGBT branding and marketing.
Yes, Coca-Cola has done some good work. Their 2018 Super Bowl ad celebrating LGBT America was well received and certainly didn’t come on the cheap.

Yet Coca-Cola also pays an estimated 33 million EUR a year to be a FIFA partner and enjoyed extensive exposure during the 2018 FIFA World Cup — an event held in Russia, a country that actively enforces anti-gay discriminatory laws and policies. Needless to say, Coca-Cola and most of FIFA’s corporate partners appeared to leave the rainbow branding at home before heading to the World Cup.
Could that have been because focusing on football was more profitable? It could well be.
But maybe that’s the point — because back in 1994, Ikea could have just focused on dining tables.
It decided to focus on inclusivity instead. Given that homosexuality is still illegal in more than 70 countries around the world, some brands would do well to give that a second thought before just slapping a rainbow on the side of their products.
Inclusivity is a right, not a privilege. Or at least that’s how we run our workplace. If you’re more about actions than just words, we could get along well.

