A Marketer’s Nightmare

This must be a painful time to be a mar­keter at Dell Com­puter. Dell has just intro­duced a svelte, feature-packed pre­mium lap­top aimed at execs, sta­tus seek­ers and “impres­sion mak­ers.” Thanks to their PR team (or influ­encer rela­tions), Dell secured a high vis­i­bil­ity blog post­ing at the NY Times dis­cussing the prod­uct and its aspi­ra­tional posi­tion­ing. Unfor­tu­nately, it backfired.

Cus­tomer Dis­sat­is­fac­tion Can Be Toxic

The blog post has already trig­gered over a hun­dred com­ments, largely neg­a­tive – some vir­u­lently so. Here’s a sam­ple com­ment, trig­gered by cus­tomer dissatisfaction:

“All that mat­ters to me is that after years of being a loyal Dell cus­tomer I have decided to NEVER pur­chase another com­puter from them again. Their cus­tomer ser­vice is now the most hor­ri­fy­ing expe­ri­ence a con­sumer can ever fear to encounter.

And sev­eral oth­ers, in the same vein:

“Buy Dell at your own peril.

“I agree with the other Dell bash­ers, they make garbage hard­ware and their sup­port is horrendous.

If I worked for Dell, this com­ment would make me cringe – and want to man­date that the peo­ple respon­si­ble for cus­tomer ser­vice take on the mis­sion to over­haul the company’s rep­u­ta­tion, based on actions and performance:

“Dell has the worst cus­tomer ser­vice I have ever encoun­tered in a com­pany, and that is say­ing a lot. I used to be a loyal cus­tomer, hav­ing pur­chased dozens of com­put­ers, servers and lap­tops from them. Recently I had an expe­ri­ence so tor­tured and kafkaesque that I vowed never to give them my money again. I use Macs and PCs, and feel that the Mac hype is overblown (they don’t work all the time either). But com­pared to Dell, any other PC would be a joy.

Many of the com­ments say, para­phrased, “For that price, get a Mac.” The com­ments offer lots of rea­sons why. (Yes, the Mac cultists are out in force…)

All of the com­ments above were made in response to the NY Times blog post.

So What Hap­pened? Why the Backlash?

The first rea­son for the neg­a­tiv­ity is a direct con­se­quence of many years of Dell’s dis­ap­point­ing cus­tomers. Peo­ple in the blog are writ­ing from their own per­sonal expe­ri­ence; anger and dis­ap­point­ment fuel their comments.

But the sub­tler rea­son is linked to brand strat­egy and the posi­tions that Dell and Apple occupy in people’s minds.

Dell’s attempt to claim the pre­mium, lust-worthy lap­top posi­tion­ing and thereby  chal­lenge Apple’s Mac­Book Pro ran afoul of “brand per­mis­sion” space. Cus­tomers are unwill­ing to grant per­mis­sion to Dell to move into a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent posi­tion­ing, given what they know and believe about the Dell brand and the com­pet­i­tive environment.

Cus­tomers do not find Dell’s aspi­ra­tional posi­tion­ing cred­i­ble, given Dell’s long-term (and very suc­cess­ful) stance as a util­i­tar­ian value leader. Their per­sonal expe­ri­ence with the brand and the way the com­pany relates to its cus­tomers rein­forces the strength of their convictions.

Cus­tomers ridicule the idea that a Dell-branded prod­uct will appeal to sta­tus seek­ers, or impress peo­ple who think of them­selves as “impres­sion mak­ers.” Here’s a com­ment that makes this point crys­tal clear — Dell is far from enjoy­ing pre­mium “badge” status:

“This is the most impres­sive lap­top you can buy… from Dell. I’d choose any brand but Dell to impress. Dell has posi­tioned itself as the brand every brain­less IT depart­ment buys every sin­gle one of their crummy locked-down com­put­ers from to run five year old soft­ware on, and I con­grat­u­late them on their suc­cess. How­ever, I would never asso­ciate that brand with any­thing that is remotely impres­sive or indi­vid­ual. They’re the Denny’s of the com­puter world.

What com­pounds Dell’s sit­u­a­tion is that cus­tomers so strongly believe Apple’s dom­i­nance of the most desir­able, high-performance posi­tion­ing that they take up arms to fend off chal­lengers to Apple’s posi­tion. For example:

“Macs are bril­liantly designed, have the BEST OS as noted by vir­tu­ally all cred­i­ble experts, has the high­est con­sumer sat­is­fac­tion lev­els, by far, as well as the high­est rat­ings for ease of use, reli­a­bil­ity, cus­tomer ser­vice, etc., so why would you buy any­thing else?

How Has Dell Responded?

Social media influ­encers, take note. Dell is prob­a­bly lis­ten­ing to these com­ments, but has no vis­i­ble pres­ence (at least not in the first two pages’ worth of com­ments) in this con­ver­sa­tion. Given the neg­a­tive tone of this debate, is that the opti­mal social media strategy?

Tagged as: Apple, brand positioning, Dell

Revised on March 28, 2011