Lady Geek

Belinda Parmar

My WARC conference presentation stressed that the best way to market to women is to be inclusive rather than to simply overtly exclude men. Nevertheless, most marketing activities aimed at women do so simply by shutting-out the other gender. It's a mirror-image of the current marketing worst-practice. Della, the new netbook sales portal from dell is a pastel-pink feminized counterpart to the unapologetically ultra-masculine Dell.com. It's a perfect example of the current trend of exclusion marketing.

I remember interviewing one Lady Geek who told me in no uncertain terms that the 'Dixons Women's Only night' was her idea of hell.

“What are they going to do, give me cheese and pineapple on a stick and tell me how to turn the telly on?”

Not exactly the response that Dixons were looking for, and in my experience a strategy which never works quite as well as the men who invented it might expect.

Marketing to women should not feel like “an initiative” i.e that a group of 40 something balding marketing men have been sitting in the boardroom and some bright spark says 'We need to appeal to women. I know, lets create a portal for women, pink up and dumb down our products...we could even call it Della...(guffaw guffaw)

I admire Dell's intent. Its brave. It shows that they recognizes that in the current environment, its a smart strategy to improve your bottom line by targeting women. I'm skeptical that Dell will achieve their objectives for two reasons:

Firstly,  do they really have a long-term commitment to growing the female market? Dell has a history of superficial and short-term business strategies such last year's half-hearted flirtation with Linux . Is there any commitment to go beyond the shell of rebranding and create something which will profoundly appeal to this new market? As Elisabeth Kelan states, when you open the Inspiron artistic shell, its just an ordinary dull Dell laptop underneath.  How much of the products and community parts of the site have been specifically developed with women in mind rather than been re-skinned to appeal to women?

Secondly, I do not think that Dell have achieved a depth of understanding of their new female audience. Evidence of this is the handy lifestyle tips which state the excessively obvious. We also find the usual marketing copy cliches such as 'giving extension to your digital life' (I don't want a digital life, I want a life with technology in it) and 'enhance your life with technology' and the 'giving' section - it's the kind of vacuous text that means absolutely nothing.

From a product perspective, the site makes a big deal of their pretty new Inspiron Netbooks, however there's not a whole lot else on the site - yet another echo of Dell's failed Linux strategy which also presented an absurdly limited subset of Dell's quite massive portfolio of products.

My research conducted with Jupiter found that a third of British women are frustrated, alienated and bored by the way tech companies market to them. Despite this most tech marketers are in denial about what must be done: There is plenty which can be done- it just needs to be executed and approached in the right way.

Strategies tech brands need to apply;

1) Go for an implicit strategy appealing to women rather than creating an overt exclusive 'silo'. Overt branding such as Della, Dixon's Women's Only nights and Comets Angels give out wrong signals. Nintendo spent hundreds of dollars understanding women and their fitness regimes but never overtly positioned Wii Fit as 'gaming for girls.'

2) Make women the heart of your strategy not the icing on the cake. Nike Women has invested millions and is part of a strategy which demonstrates Nike's long term commitment to women. It goes beyong flogging products and starts to offer real benefits.

3) Develop an authentic understanding of women and what they want before you embark on women only strategies. Employ experts such as the Lady Geeks (shameless plug) who will help you go beyond the superficial and can deliver your proposition in a way that is not going to get women irritated. Dell have lost touch with the reality of those women its trying to sell to.

4) Position technology as entertainment rather than a female or male pursuit. Jeremy Clarkson, has equal appeal and ratings amongst both sexes. Rather than talk about the technical aspects of a car in a dry way, he has used humour and entertainment as a way to make cars appealing.

Della is a somewhat superficial step in the right direction. Lets just hope Dell listen to their customers and radically overhaul Della the concept before it becomes yet another of Dell's six-month flirtations.