The Literal Spaces for Brands to Explore LGBTQ+ Live Experiences

Experiential marketing has often been underrated in terms of allyship and action for the LGBTQ+ community—and of late, it has been taking up less headspace than sexy mass media brand plays amid surges and lockdowns. But as experiential rises again, consider what it now means to be on the ground with the LGBTQ+ community. It means you’re alongside us as people, with employees showing up as community members and allies. It means you’re (hopefully) invested in funding an experience endemic to our culture or in finding and preserving queer spaces. It means that you show up as you speak up. And that last point is essential: As people show how they’re demanding consistency between brand word and action, experiential can and should be a creative focal point. So, let’s talk about spaces. They’re vital to LGBTQ+ culture, but they’re declining. Bloomberg even called them “an endangered species” this year; one report estimated that a third of gay bars have closed over a 12-year period. This is why we obsess over Jagermeister’s support for U.S. lesbian bars: The brand is literally giving LGBTQ+ people and culture a place to live. But the bar space is an interesting counterpoint to the way brands show up at parades, where allies are a growing part of the experience. Sometimes these experiences need to be for you and us, while sometimes they need to be just for us. How This LGBTQ+, Woman-Owned Coffee Brand Aims to Create a More Inclusive Space While there are areas of marketing where we want everyone to just jump in (like the innovation of brand purpose metrics), experiential is more nuanced. Brands should tread with mindfulness and courtesy to make sure they’re welcome in the experiences they’re looking to support. (We’ve already got bachelorette parties to deal with.) Exploratory brands ready to provide specific value can find an advantage in how they connect—and those that do know there’s a wealth of opportunity in the experiential space beyond bars and clubs. Music festivals Imagine a junior tasked with researching “queer music festivals” for a brand to sponsor. Laughably, when you search the term on Wikipedia, only seven are listed, globally, but not before there's a subcategory for circuit parties. Can a queer music festival hold the same business status for queer artists as playing at Glastonbury, Outside Lands, Bonnaroo? And as some of these mainstream festivals become less about music and more about influencer VIP suites, can queer music festivals be uplifted to become true places of music appreciation, queer creative business and artist discovery? Brands focused on entertainment (maybe Apple Music, the new Super Bowl Halftime supporter) could give mainstream credibility to the subculture of queer record labels that’s been bubbling since about 2019, which feeds into and out of festivals. Of course, you’d need to elevate these stages on community terms, but that’s still more community support than supporting Coachella and Portola, whose owner has a problematic stance on LGBTQ+ matters. Convention culture Plenty of LGBTQ+ conferences converge around a wide variety of topics all year round, but should queerness have its own expo? Or is “Con culture”—Comic-Con, VidCon, etc.—sufficiently representative of LGBTQ+ communities? Consider DragCon: Arguably, it’s currently the biggest queer expo in the world, with thousands of queer businesses (including drag queens as small business owners) exhibiting. There’s so much opportunity for brands to give us focus around which to gather. At a queer cultural event, why wouldn’t a brand like CoverGirl provide a space for those people specifically focused on make-up? And at a con that’s not explicitly gay, why wouldn’t that same brand create the space for LGBTQ+ people to speak to their community-specific product concerns? Fitness forums There’s something to be said for simply helping us find each other. Take the fitness category, where most of a brand’s experience comes to life in physical locations. Sometimes you just want to help queer people be found, like the OUT Foundation is doing for people in the CrossFit arena. Or a brand could sponsor something like this Inclusive Fitness Finder that helps people find experiences in the first place. Film festivals Do LGBTQ+ film festivals carry the same industry caché as Cannes, Toronto or Sundance? Patently not. There’s an opportunity here for trade media and partners to help build that. Tribeca became part of the global circuit on the back of Robert De Niro’s career. Before that, Sundance and Robert Redford. Perhaps someone like Ryan Murphy or Jodie Foster as visible benefactors would build cred. Or maybe there’s a new playbook to be written here, where brands are a bridge. In the same manner that Taco Bell made Lil Nas X chief impact officer, a brand like Disney or A24 could align a star with a festival as a vested leader in the enterprise and as a curator of the actual in-person experience. The LGBTQ+ Opportunities Almost No Brand Has Touched When you close your eyes and think of what you want in life, you’re less likely to envision something on a screen as you are to imagine something real that you can live through, in a space that caters to your senses and your safety alike. Experience and memories will outlive awareness and sentient metrics, for those brands ready to literally explore new spaces. Fortune favors the bold—and in DEI progress, it definitely favors the respectful. So brands: Explore opportunities to create live brand experiences reflective of how your brands can make real life better for real people.