how to rainbow market if you don’t support lgbtqia+ rights, in 2 easy steps
June arrives and something remarkable happens. Logos turn rainbow, limited-edition merchandise appears, brands that spent the previous eleven months donating to anti-LGBTQ politicians suddenly discover their deep and abiding love for the community. It is a reliable cycle, and audiences (particularly the queer audiences these brands are courting) have gotten very good at clocking it.
So in the spirit of public service, here is a practical guide to rainbow marketing if your company does not support LGBTQ rights. Follow these steps and you will achieve the full effect: alienating the community you're targeting and setting your brand equity on fire before July.
Step One: Don't Do Anything the Other Eleven Months
The most straightforward on the list. And we get it! No photo opportunities, no LGBTQ support. A Pride campaign out of nowhere is a transaction: their attention for your revenue, no values exchange required. At least you’re up front about it. Bonus points if you, like a number of Fortune 500 companies, run Pride campaigns while your political action committees fund lawmakers who sponsored or voted for anti-LGBTQ legislation. (P.S., The Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index tracks this.)
Jokes aside, when a company runs a Pride campaign, it is asking queer people and their allies to trust it with their sense of being seen. That is a significant ask. This is a community that has been demonstrably harmed by institutions—including corporations—performing support and then disappearing when push comes to shove.
Subaru understood this, which is why their relationship with LGBTQ consumers is a 30-year case study rather than a cautionary tale. In the mid-1990s, Subaru's marketing team discovered that lesbians and gay men over-indexed in their customer base alongside skiers, teachers, and nurses. Rather than pivot away from that finding, they committed to it, incrementally at first, then more openly as the years went on. Their early ads featured same-sex couples before doing so was mainstream or commercially safe.
They built a relationship before they built a campaign.
Step Two: Fold the Moment Anyone Complains
Target spent years building a Pride collection. In 2023, under a wave of threats and pressure, they pulled products and moved displays to the back of stores. Bud Light partnered with trans creator Dylan Mulvaney on a small campaign that same year, and when backlash hit, company executives publicly distanced themselves from their own marketing decision, leaving Mulvaney without support while the campaign was still live.
In the mid-to-late 1990s when Subaru’s ads started running, The American Family Association called for boycotts. Subaru didn't pull campaigns or issue apologies, and their sales grew anyway.
Now, the people most likely to boycott Subaru over LGBTQ content have already self-selected out of being Subaru customers, or who understand that’s just who Subaru is—like the (promise to come back here after you click) “hungry first, gay second” Chick-fil-A meme. Chick-fil-A never lied about who they were. The brand has been building this association long enough that its customer base organically became people who were fine with it or actively drawn to it. There was no silent majority of Subaru buyers who were surprised and offended. The surprise had already happened years earlier, and those people bought Toyotas instead.
You Can, In Fact, Make Everyone Mad
We’ve been taught since grade school that you can’t please everyone. But, if you rainbow wash during Pride month, you can, in fact, please no one.
Take Target for example. Target is a mass-market retailer whose value proposition is that everyone shops there. When they introduced Pride merchandise, they were introducing it to a customer base that included a significant slice of people who had never associated Target with any particular values stance because Target had never really taken one. That offended people who thought Target shouldn’t support LGBTQ rights and also people who thought Target hadn’t earned the right to take their money for LGBTQ products.
Subaru's LGBTQ customers and allies are loyal, repeat buyers who feel personal ownership over the brand. When the AFA came for Subaru, those customers actively defended them. When Chick-fil-A went viral for not supporting LGBTQ rights, its customers lined up in record numbers.
Rainbow washing brands don't have that. They get the backlash with none of the loyal constituency to absorb it.
With that said, a company can run a meaningful Pride campaign without Subaru's 30-year track record. The companies that get destroyed are the ones whose Pride presence is out of proportion with what is true inside, whose campaigns imply a depth of commitment that evaporates when the month is over.
There Are No Shortcuts to Building Trust
This is, at its core, a messaging problem and it obeys the same rules as every other messaging problem. Authenticity is not a creative brief. Authenticity predates the creative brief, earned before the campaign. An audience with genuine stakes in whether you mean what you say will figure out whether you mean what you say.
There are no shortcuts to building trust with the LGBTQ community. There are plenty of shortcuts to destroying it. Asking for someone's loyalty and money without having earned either is one of the fastest.
— Britta
LAHO is a PR and marketing agency for professional service firms, emerging brands, and public figures. Think PR with punch, marketing with mood, and the strategy a vision board would hire. We pride ourselves on having creative ideas and being strategy-first, so all the stand-out things we do to build visibility and growth are also backed by experience & data. Need help building trust and authenticity with your audience? Reach out here.
