UNMARRIED BLISS; Bliss

American Demographics, Dec, 2000 by Rebecca Gardyn

Despite this group's huge market potential, however, marketers have been slow to reach out to these consumers. When Dorian Solot and Marshall Miller - both twentysomething and happily unmarried for eight years - applied for joint tenants insurance in Boston, they were told by a local agent that their only choice was to apply for individual policies at almost twice the cost. They decided to shop around, and eventually found an agency catering to the gay and lesbian community, which signed them up for joint tenants and auto insurance with no problem. In fact, many heterosexual couples turn to - and are welcomed by - gay professionals who are better equipped to navigate the complex legal and financial issues that unmarried couples often face.

"But not all heterosexuals have access to or are comfortable with gay and lesbian businesses," says Miller, who is co-founder with Solot of the Alternatives to Marriage Project (ATMP), a national organization for unmarried couples. "That is why there is such a great marketing opportunity to reach a much wider audience."

The main reason marketers have so far ignored this segment is quite simple: Most have never thought of unmarried, opposite-sex couples as a consumer demographic. American Express, for example, has been using its proprietary dual-client analysis software to help unmarried couples create tax and estate plans for ten years. But its marketing efforts for such services have so far been limited to the gay and lesbian community. The company has placed ads in national gay publications and has employed advisors around the country who actively network within this constituency at a local level. But there are about 2.5 times as many opposite-sex cohabiting couples as there are of the same-sex variety (4.2 million compared with 1.7 million). Why not market to them as well? "That's a good question," says James Law, branch manager of American Express Financial Advisors in New York City. "I guess because the marketplace doesn't segment consumers that way. We target African Americans, Hispanics, women, gays, but `unmarried, straight people' is a very diffused target."

Indeed, even if businesses wished to target this group, they're likely to encounter major difficulties, both in identifying and accessing them through the usual media and networking channels. "How would you even get to those people?" asks Maria Elgar, a financial consultant at Merrill Lynch in Westport, Connecticut, who works extensively with unmarried couples in the gay and lesbian community. Elgar solicits many of her clients through her involvement with various AIDS fundraisers and through musicians and entertainers at the club she owns in Los Angeles. However, Elgar says she's never heard of anyone specifically targeting the unmarried, straight-couple market. "Where would you ever find yourself in a natural community of unmarried couples like that?"

The lack of media outlets and organizations specifically tailored to this demographic impedes marketers who might benefit from reaching them. (Besides ATMP and the American Association for Single People [AASP] in Los Angeles, there are few, if any, other groups and no known media outlets specifically targeting this category.) Marsha Stewart, an editor at Nolo Press, which sells a variety of do-it-yourself legal advice books for the living-together market, explains that the wide range of ages and situations which compose the unmarried couple group makes getting the message out to all of them nearly impossible.