Analysis by Candynce Boney in KIN 501
During opening night of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Chevrolet aired two commercials featuring gay couples for the first time in both of their television slots. It is important to note Chevy went through with these commercials with the understanding that Sochi had enforced anti-gay laws. All the families in these commercials were real life families that were found through both social media and outreach. Not only does Chevrolet show gay couples there are also multi-racial families shown in these commercials. Chevy’s goal is to explore “what it means to be a family these days.” During the second commercial they show a gay couple celebrating their marriage and an openly gay scientist, Jack Andraka who developed a way to test for pancreatic cancer. Although during the commercials the pictures flash by rather quickly it is still easy to recognize both the mixed race families and the gay couples.
With Chevrolet promoting their new marketing technique, they seem to have placed a large amount of emphasis on slogans. America is starting to become more of a nondiscriminatory country, their slogans does a great job catch the attention of new era Americans. What I mean by new era Americans is, for this current generation everything is about being inclusive and politically correct. Many of the young Americans now are multi-racial and support Same Sex Marriages. Therefore Chevy is reaching a large population of people with opening this new market scheme.
From a marketing standpoint, I was curious as to how Chevy’s older more conservative customers would respond to the new marketing technique. As one would expect the responses to this commercial were not good. People said they would never purchase another car from Chevrolet; some went as far to say they would sale their current Chevrolet vehicles due to these commercials. In my opinion this is still a good marketing technique, as I mentioned before, people are becoming more liberal in their standpoints on relationships.
More specifically for up and coming marketers, the field is constantly evolving with today’s new society roles and trends. We would need to confront some of those old stereotypes, not being afraid of going after something new. In my opinion, as a marketer it is important to understand, not every person will agree with all marketing tool and techniques used, but in order to evolve in the field barriers have to be pushed. It is going to be easier to push these barriers in companies as large as Chevrolet, but even on a college level doing more inclusive things and making everyone feel welcomed may produce better outcomes at different events around campus.
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