Dell: Sexist and patronising?
Whenever a tech company launches a product or site designed for women, the result is usually embarrassing or patronising. Dell’s attempt at launching a new website designed at those tricksy females manages to be both, mentioning all the lovely things ladies can do with laptops, such as reading a nice book or perhaps tracking your weight. How delightful!
If you’ve taken a look at the site you might have noticed there aren’t really any new products on show, just a lot of marketing, pictures of happy looking women and vague articles about fashion and being green.
The actual products involved that old staple of tech attempts to attract the female market, pretty colours. It’s not just pretty colours though; you can also get your laptop with a nice bag, too.
It’s really hard to see who dell is marketing at here. The kind of financial secure well connected and tech aware woman most of the content is aimed at will find the site patronising while others won’t be afford the special price tags of the fashion netbooks on show. Either way, if you’re looking to make a fashion statement there are far more appealing brands out there. Dell have a long, long way to go before than compete with HP and Sony in the fashion stakes, and is there any point even mentioning Apple?
Other brands do market to women and yes, they do often use fashion to do so, but they don’t often go as far as Dell in suggesting what women might like to do with their brand new computer, unlike Dell. Don’t try using anything complicated like the Office stuff or boring work girls, you can use these things to find the nearest coffee shop, yoga lessons and books about Johnny Deep instead! Seriously, the PC market is a bit of slump, but is this really the kind of solution we need?
Posted on May 15, 2009 | Filed Under Tech
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