Image: two smiling newlyweds. Slogan: You know what you want / Let no one tell you what you want.

If you're a lesbian, you've probably stood in front of a Kutxa Labor office, looking at that ad. You may have identified yourself with that pair dressed in white. You probably don't like marriages, you think they're a heteronormatization of gays and lesbians, and therefore, you wrinkle your forehead. But surely that slogan has a special meaning for you.

How many times have you been told what your desire should be, to whom do you want? Maybe your mother keeps repeating over and over again that the path you've chosen is not the right one, that you'd be happier with a man. Or, happy or not, that heterosexuality is the only right choice. You may have married your girlfriend and someone from your family decides not to attend the wedding because they do not accept your desire. Perhaps that day was happy because before the people you love you responded proudly “Yes, I want” to your partner.

The advertising agency that has designed this ad knows the meaning and depth of this phrase for gays and lesbians. Many will be grateful to see “ourselves” in an ad. Moreover, perhaps someone, encouraged by that announcement, decides to open an account in that bank. There will be LGTB people that that marketing strategy will upset, that is, that a company uses our fights and bitterness to sell mortgages. However, the advertising agency knows that this announcement will generate emotion in gays and lesbians, that it will not go unnoticed and that it will be stored in our memory. Is this not the main objective of the advertising strategy, to draw attention and to link a certain brand with values?

This advertising agency probably recalled the Subaru car campaign in the United States in the 1990s. They realized the success of subaru cars among lesbians and in those years they made a wager that could be risky and risky: recognize that lesbian community was a strategic market niche. They chose a slogan that the LGTB community would understand. “It’s not a choice. It’s the way we’re built.” (It's not an option. “I am what I am.” (I'm who I am.) Several lesbian icons were also used: Turn the tennis player Martina Navratilova into the protagonist of a campaign and make a wink to the Xena series, the warrior princess. In the next decade, a protagonist of the L Word lesbian series, a tennis player, decided to become Subaru's image with a slogan that meant coming out of the closet.

Over the years, many marketing experts studied this case and concluded that the LGTB community is an untapped market. The concept of “pink capital” is currently used to describe the commodification of the LGTB community. Some companies have recognised that we are “excellent customers” (they have privileged gays and lesbians in mind). Others not yet: we are an important group of clients of reproduction clinics assisted by lesbians, and yet, in the ads of the clinics only appear women isolated normatives. Apart from exceptions like Subaru, we don't exist, no one questions it. Will we ever leave an ad for Laboral Kutxa?