Business Strategies for a New Marketing Target

Abstract

In the last few years, in Italy various companies have started to consider homosexual people as an important commercial target. IKEA group, in 2010 launched a spot in which there was a couple of gay men making shopping. What have been the effects of this special market strategy among gay people? To find an answer we made a survey of 200 homosexual from Apulia (a region of South Italy).We have adopted the “snow ball†methodology, the best practice to catch the so called “rare populationsâ€. Our analysis shows that incomes and the possibility to choose IKEA are linked by a linear negative function: as income increases, the propensity to buy IKEA products decreases. More deeply, making a quantitative analysis, the most interesting results confirm that the purchase does not depend exclusively on the cost price of products, but also by the good quality/price ratio, and by the capability in offering trendy items. So, this business strategy does not seem to have the effect so much hoped: gays prefer to buy at IKEA for reasons not related to its attention towards issues regarding the respect for "diversity". The aim of this work is to corroborate the “geographical†differences in the way gay people accept IKEA strategies. So, we will make the same analysis (measure of dependence; linear or multinomial regression, crossing tables)with a sample of 200 homosexuals coming from Tuscany (a region of North Italy) to underline the differences about the impact that these strategies have had among Italian gay people.
Keywords: Business, Daeversity, Marketing sectorial.