Pink pound

Pink pound is a term describing the purchasing power of the LGBT community in Britain. (Occasionally, the similarly termed "blue pound" is used specifically for lesbians). In the United States, this spending is known as the pink dollar.

The British gay market is estimated to be worth up to £6 billion a year. Groups and organisations such as OutRage!, the NUS LGBT Campaign and the Queer Youth Alliance have been critical of the rapid adoption of goods and services aimed purely at the LGBT community for what they see as negative aspects of larger society, especially commercialism (including treating LGBT people as a distinct market segment or audience), conformism (though it may have different norms to which it pressures members to conform), and ghettoisation.

The Pink Pound is often considered to be responsible for the high sales of specific products seen to be favoured by a large number of gay people, most noticeably music sales of records by gay icons such as Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Cher and Britney Spears. A range of large corporations have recently realised the power of the Pink Pound and have begun to directly market their products towards the gay community through advertising in the gay press. In June 2006 a specialised marketing conference called the Pink Pound Conference was held in London and a similar conference was held in November 2006 by the Market Research Society.

A large market of goods and services for gays has appeared in recent years, including gay wedding services, gay press including radio and television, and domestic services such as builders and plumbers. In 2001 several gay companies produced pink stickers and stuck them onto thousands of Pound Coins which are still in circulation.