Fellers at Dell ditch Della?
Fluffy, female-friendly site offline
Updated 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 retailing's answer to sanitary towel advertisements, there were lots of photos of girls wearing flowery dresses and straw hats, surfing in sun-drenched mountain valleys, relaxing on colour co-ordianated cushions and brightly checking email before traveling in to the office.
There's was a lot of text in pink. Women in business apparel wore glasses.
We say 'were' and 'was' because the site isn't there anymore. Della's URL,
http://content.dell.com/us/en/home/della.aspx,
now redirects to the more generic
http://content.dell.com/us/en/home/lifestyle.aspx
and all the actual content has gone.
The site's sub-sections now redirect from Della-specific URLs to lifestyle ones. A search for the term 'della' yields the bald statement: "No matches found."
Will it return - or is all this cross-dressing gone for good?
Did it all prove too much for the jocks at Dell? Or might it be that women are perfectly able to choose, buy and use technology without all this pink, fluffy patronising nonsense? ®
Update
Dell's (undoubtedly male) web team have got the content back up - minus the Della branding. Ladies, you now get help to "protect your investment with a stylish sleeve" and "the hottest laptops that match your style".
COMMENTS
Dell-4-Blacks(tm), SlantIDell, and more great new marketing ideas
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 As long as Dell's basing things on outdated stereotypes and carving up the world into neat little categories based on meaningless physical attributes (meaningless as applied to computing anyway), let's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".
By the sounds of it..
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.
Not that I thought the sitelet was of value, particularly...
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.
The real reason Della was dropped...
...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.
