Data On Same-Sex Couples Still Hard To Come By
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When Simmons Market Research Bureau surveyed 3,896 gay and lesbian U.S. consumers in 1996, it found that 69% had life insurance and 77% had savings accounts.
Those appear to be some of the freshest, most detailed published figures available on the U.S. gay and lesbian financial services market.
Todd Evans, president of Rivendell Marketing Company Inc., Westfield, N.J., says the difficulty of finding hard data on gay and lesbian consumers is understandable, given the nature of the market.
"With any underserved community, statistics are very expensive, and it takes a long time to get them," Evans says.
Evans, whose company places advertisements in a network of gay newspapers, is trying to work with an advertising agency, Prime Access Inc., New York, and Simmons Market Research Bureau, New York, to improve the quantity and timeliness of the data.
Rivendell and Prime Access will be helping Simmons reach gay and lesbian consumers with annual consumer surveys starting in 2002.
Craig Harper, executive vice president of custom research at Simmons, says the new, annual gay and lesbian market survey series is desperately needed.
Gay and lesbian publications have commissioned surveys for their own publications in the past five years, but Harper says he has a hard time thinking of any detailed, comprehensive, national surveys published more recently than the study Simmons released in 1996.
"Since that time, much has changed in the marketplace," Harper says.
