Yeah, I’ve been sniffing around for a new laptop lately and I’m looking for one that’s tough and fast but not pretty. Mostly the Dell website is like “hey, you say you want a fast computer? I’ll bet you’re a gamer!” and I’m like “um, no, I just want to d–” “NO YOU ARE A GAMER TEENAGE BOY now come look at the silvery colors!” “…but, I just want to know if th–” “IT HAS THE WORD XTREME IN THE NAME! Let’s not look at specs let’s play HALO ‘CAUSE YOU’RE A GAMER!”

This, and the pink (and the overall shitty quality) is part of why I’m not buying Dell this time around. Yick. Just give me the goddamn specs please.

If you take a look at their website, they are clearly selling on style, but there is an interesting difference between Alienware and Della’s marketing strategies. The style is marketed together with the idea that they are good computers. It’s like they are saying “Check out how powerful this computer looks! A computer that looks this powerful must be awesome!” You have to really search on the Della site to even find any insinuation that they sell good computers.

It’s also an interesting reflection of how companies market aesthetics to men and women.

As an example, women never shaved their legs or underarms until Gillette launched a massive campaign to convince us all that women who don’t shave are gross.

Women are concerned about “style” because lots of companies have invested lots of money to make sure they think they are supposed to. And now Dell is one more of those companies to add to the pool.

And saying that people should be “burned” because they participate in society is completely absurd. What the hell?

I worked for a large media-savvy company a few years back, in an up-and-coming-young-protege position, so I got to see a lot of the top levels of management in action without having any effect on their decisions.

I was surprised by how little market analysis really happened, even for things like major advertising campaigns. I was appalled when I found out that this was a cost-cutting measure, because the charismatic CEO would throw out any market research he disagreed with. Since his grasp of our market was slippery at best, it was cheaper just not to do the research than to throw out the majority of it.

I strongly suspect that this is why we ran several rather offensive ad campaigns while I was there. Oddly, none of them were at all successful …

But I doubt anything is going to change in that regard until the campaigns are determined to be ineffective in terms of helping the company achieve their sales goals. It might turn off some or even a lot of potential buyers, but are the number of buyers insulted by such a campaign offset by the number who are drawn to it? I’d guess that the process for determining whether to abandon an ad campaign is similar to how auto companies determine if a recall is in order: Are the number of probable lawsuits (or lost sales) about a defect (or ad campaign) going to cost more or less than a recall? If less, no recall. In a cost-benefit analysis of a marketing campaign like this it’s all about the ratio of consumers feeling insulted vs. those buying the products.

Companies respond to their bottom line, not their conscience. Management personnel aren’t even allowed to listen to their consciences (if they have ‘em) since the mandate of a corporation is profit and growth, period. See how long a CEO who “does the right thing” at the expense of profit lasts, and I don’t mean the all-too-common empty posturing that somehow passes as substantive action.