Ok, come on. Am I the only one who’s wondering what those two “computer techs” were doing before they popped up singing Lollipop and putting their clothes back on?
All joking aside (ok, maybe not all joking), are we really supposed to be wooed into buying a piece of crap Dell laptop, simply because they’ve made them brightly coloured and, apparently, manufactured by the Village People in some futuristically automated factory?
Are general consumers really this stupid or is this yet another caricature of consumer fidelity? I’d say both, but then, I didn’t fall for this ridiculous attempt to fool us into believing that Dell hasn’t been the pinnacle of overpriced personal computers and electronics for the last decade at least.
Realistically, this ad is targeted toward teens anyway, specifically, female teenagers. Dell marketers have latched onto the notion that parents buy whatever their children ask (read tell) them to. This has been a feature of Saturday morning cartoons for at least 30 years (and for those of you who are wondering what Saturday morning cartoons are, ask your parents what we had before the Cartoon Network), and near as I can tell, the psychology behind it is at least as effective as impulse product placement in grocery stores.
Dell is preying on two simple ideas that permeate the general consumer market; 1) kids don’t care how things work, they care only that they do, and that they look good while doing it. 2) Parent’s (at least the current generation who’s dishing out the money for these pieces of computer crap) won’t take the time to shop around for the best mix of affordability and quality. This is opposed to the previous generation who was just baffled by the techno-babble that went along with computers, and who would just buy whatever the child/sales guy/TV talking head told them to.
At one point I questioned whether or not Dell was a division of Wal-Mart, but I think they’re just two entities taking advantage of the same concept…people are bloody lazy. Doubt me? Think about the online/call center nature of Dell Computers sales. As easy as it would be to go out and actually compare the various brands, types and models of computer that are available, Dell customers would rather just take the easy way of ordering inferior components over the phone.
Well, any way you slice it, the information one needs when considering the purchase of a new computer is not equivalent to watching a gang of overall wearing weirdo’s as they oversee blobs of colour get transformed into laptops. This alone should tell you that Dell is trying to manipulate you, rather than inform you.
I known, I know, what else is new with today’s commercials.