I adore NewEgg, so it comes as no surprise that their Mother's Day advertising makes me so very happy. Ok, the font is pink, and so is that camera, but I can let that go. I'm much happier about the items they are actually pushing, which traditionally you wouldn't see until Father's Day.
Case in point: the Toshiba 32' LED-LCD tv. Most advertisers would insist that good ol' Mom couldn't use this no matter how hard she tried; it's just way over her head. For those of us with normal mothers (who just happened to run the AV club in middle school), we know that plugging a DVD player and a cable jack into a panel is not impossible. So kudos to NewEgg for assuming our Mom's know their AVs and USBs.
But my favorite part? No cleaning machines! Not a vacuum, iron or carpet shampooer to be seen! Actually, no beauty tech either, beside an electric toothbrush (shown in the email flier, not the linked site).
Their advertising slant is for the "Tech-savvy Mom," and the actual text explains that this is not an anomaly; this is just a normal Mom, who long ago stopped vacuuming in pearls and started firing up her PS3 to watch Rescue Me on Netflix (utterly addictive, btw).
So thank you, NewEgg, for not only assuming our mothers have reasonable IQs but also for pointing out by comparison the outdated crap-vertising other companies use based on models that were outdated 20 years ago.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Ladies' sizing out of whack...also, water deemed wet
After reading this article, I realize just how futile our whining about sizing can be. Everyone knows the problem: standardized sizing is completely non-existent, and the cookie-cutter manufacturing industry has yet to come up with a solution to the not-so-cookie-cutter American female body. This unpredictable model is the source of the problem. Every body is different, and there is no cost effective way to actually navigate this problem.
That isn't where the problem stops. Mass manufacturing is outsourced (note: clothing manufacturing is among the top 10 dying industries), so any standardization would be impossible to adopt and almost as impossible to enforce.
Additionally, we have the "problem" of vanity sizing. Ok, forcing a good chunk of the slimmer population into the negative sizes is definitely not a good thing. However, vanity sizing came about because manufacturing standards could not keep up with the American waistline. Yet, as with anything, manufacturing should and will cater to the average. If out of 10 women, one has a size 27" waist, one a 40" waist and 8 have a 34" inch waist, profits are not to be made catering to the outliers.
And yes, supermodels are outliers...which are held up as the "norm," at least according to the advertising industry. Now we're starting to see the big, skewed, dysfunctional picture.
Now, what I do like about this article is it offers a solution: the full-body scan. However, this doesn't solve the original problem. It just solves the problem created by a problem. The actual solution? Well, that's more than slightly complicated. We could go back to custom-made clothing, but there is no easy way to come back from the mass outsourcing of manufacturing cookie-cutter clothes. The bottom line: there will never be an acceptable standard, and outliers will always be left in the dust (except supermodels, of course). The good thing about the current system is that somewhere, at some store, there is a good chance that something will fit in a size that will not make you weep silently in a corner.
That isn't where the problem stops. Mass manufacturing is outsourced (note: clothing manufacturing is among the top 10 dying industries), so any standardization would be impossible to adopt and almost as impossible to enforce.
Additionally, we have the "problem" of vanity sizing. Ok, forcing a good chunk of the slimmer population into the negative sizes is definitely not a good thing. However, vanity sizing came about because manufacturing standards could not keep up with the American waistline. Yet, as with anything, manufacturing should and will cater to the average. If out of 10 women, one has a size 27" waist, one a 40" waist and 8 have a 34" inch waist, profits are not to be made catering to the outliers.
And yes, supermodels are outliers...which are held up as the "norm," at least according to the advertising industry. Now we're starting to see the big, skewed, dysfunctional picture.
Now, what I do like about this article is it offers a solution: the full-body scan. However, this doesn't solve the original problem. It just solves the problem created by a problem. The actual solution? Well, that's more than slightly complicated. We could go back to custom-made clothing, but there is no easy way to come back from the mass outsourcing of manufacturing cookie-cutter clothes. The bottom line: there will never be an acceptable standard, and outliers will always be left in the dust (except supermodels, of course). The good thing about the current system is that somewhere, at some store, there is a good chance that something will fit in a size that will not make you weep silently in a corner.
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