Fellers at Dell ditch Della? PC giant Dell is no longer in touch with its feminine side, it seems. It has taken its female-friendly sub-site, Della, offline less than ten days after launching it online. The sub-site was dedicated to promoting the virtues of netbooks, and Dell's diminutive Inspiron Mini 10 in particular, to the fairer sex. Technology …
...or not, but anyway.
I was showing a friend the Della site last week and a good portion of the content had changed since the first aticle about it on the reg. There was something about listening to their customers and a lot of the patronizing "with a notebook you can track your calories" crap had gone.
I guess they've realized just how badly it pissed off female techies.
"...perfectly able to choose, buy and use technology without all this pink, fluffy patronising nonsense?"
Yup.
One wonders who was in charge of Dell's marketing. Was it outsourced to someone living in a time warp? "E for effort" at trying to reach out to new customers, but still a fail (oh alright, failure then). So if Dell has realized their mistake and corrected it, that's good.
Besides that, it's still true in some cases, products marketed specifically towards women, can tend to be of inferior quality (one can debate what *that* means some other time) - such as shoes that fall apart if (heaven forbid) a woman actually uses said shoes for walking (wow, what a concept), clothing that's shoddily sewn (and no pockets!!), of course all at twice or three times the price of similar men's attire. So I wouldn't have trusted a Dell "women's computer" because I'd be concerned that Dell might be using second-rate parts that barely passed QC figuring that it would only be used for light-duty looking-up of the maligned "recipes" etc., not for serious use.
Sweet! I complained to them back on the 13th:
http://www.katescomment.com/della/
On the 14th the offensive elements I highlighted were removed (the "tech tips")....
> 2. Get healthier: Use your mini to track calories, carbs and protein with ease, watch online fitness videos, map your running routes and more.
> 3. Eat better: Find recipes online, store and organize them, and watch cooking videos.
> 4. Get organized: ‘Remember the Milk’ is a free, tweakable online task manager that’s easy to use.
...and now they've canned the whole thing!
Maybe I should complain more. ;)
Kate
MD, Memset
Female techies complained. But it wasn't generalising to them, more to the "duh, I'l just buy the prettiest laptop and be done with it" sorts.
Female techies already know what a netbook is and what they can do. Tech sites aren't really gender specific, they're corporate. Perhaps because corporate IT is still viewed as a masculine-dominated area the generic corporate branding makes it feel masculine. I never saw anything on Dell's site promising their 10 incher would make me a 12 incher or have the sex appeal of 2.5 George Clooneys.
If they made 'splosion and nudity filled site to sell to "normal" blokes, I wouldn't feel offended. It'd just be funny. They already cater to me by not giving me bullshit and just laying down the specs.
but.. it wasn't aimed at tech savvy females, shurely.
I would imagine that there exists a portion of the market who could be somewhat amenable to such marketing initiatives.
Of course, the problem for firms that decide to utilise such "targetted" marketing, is that those who view this type of thing negatively are far more likely to be seen giving their "suggestions and points of view" on such matters.
...was that productivity of male Dell employees was dropping off as they weren't getting enough sleep on their couches (those that weren't sleeping in their offices out of fear to go home).
You don't sell a product by implying your target demographic is facile (even Apple, who's target demographic these days IS the facile set*, know better ).
(And my family is still under orders that anyone buying me a pink screwdriver will need a good proctologist to assist with returning it to the store :-P )
----
*Which doesn't mean all Apple users are facile: there are still a few who are desperately clinging to the '90's when Apple PCs were genuinely superior to anything else available and well worth the extra cost.
For starters, Dell needs a Dell-4-Blacks(tm)*. The shuffling-and-jiving strangely-dressed black customer says:
"Damn! That shore am a nice computah! Ah gotta git me one of 'um!" Customer then 'axts' some more questions about the Dell-4-Blacks(tm) then proceeds to diss all other brands of PCs and buys the Dell-4-Blacks(tm) because "They's a company what obvioushly understands muh needs."
But why stop there? As long as Dell's basing things on outdated stereotypes and carving up the world into neat little categories based on meaningless physical attributes (meaningless as applied to computing anyway), let's have these too:
- Del, for short people
- SlantIDell, for Asians because they all look the same and have the same needs
- DellDominator, for those pesky Germans who as we all know still have secret plans to take over the world, again
Well you can see that the possibilities are endless! Dell rules!
Now I'm embarrassed to admit to even owning any Dells :(
* NOTE: All stereotypes above are to make a point and do not represent author's beliefs about "those people".
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