I have to say, I’m surprised by the fact that Dell actually acknowledged the criticism my blogging cronies and I and have issued towards their condescending and out-of-touch efforts to market to women. And so quickly. We’ve seen startups do this, but it’s kind of rare that a hardware company would pay so much attention to the chatter online. That’s cool, and I commend the company for that.
The problem is, the response is lame. I realize it would take them more than a few days to go back to the drawing board and/or take back what they created. Because that’s what they’d essentially need to do. The site’s marketing is so misguided, they’d need to start from scratch — even drop the whole concept of creating a site geared at women. We know you want to sell us these things, but they are computers, not purses. C’mon now.
But instead of issuing a place-holder type of response (i.e., “thanks for your feedback, which was x, y, and z. Hold your horses; we’ll be back with something better soon”), they made a couple of copy tweaks to their “tech tips” page, and added this preface:
Editors Note: Some of you have read this article over the last several days and will notice a few modifications. You spoke; we listened. Thank you for your ongoing feedback.
In terms of what they actually modified, I think they softened up the whole “you’re fat and stupid, and buying a netbook from us can fix that” message. Or at least the fat part. They still list “get smarter” as one of the things a netbook can help women do. But that doesn’t even begin to remedy the fact that all of this messaging is categorized under the umbrella of “tech tips” — or that the whole site basically screams, “omg you guys! math is hard, netbooks are fun!”
But I don’t condemn Dell for trying to save face. I think it’s cute.
[Photo: Flickr/joshb]
