Open Letter to Thierry Mugler

Dear Mr. Mugler,

Today, as I was perusing (and thoroughly loathing) the newly-redesigned MSN.com, I “happened” across your Womanity website. I say “happened” because, as your website is actually a Microsoft venture, I am well aware that there was nothing coincidental about the fact that your website was being promoted by MSN.com.

I have several problems with your website, ranging from the superficial to the not-so-superficial. First of all, the name of your website is, quite honestly, insulting to my (and every other woman’s) intelligence. “Womanity”? Really? That’s not just a joke, or…something? Because it’s really getting old, the idea that women need some cutesy made-up word to describe who we are or what we do. The last time I checked, there were approximately 900,000 words in the English language; is your marketing team really so incompetent that they couldn’t find a better word, or combination of words, from that pool? If that was the case, perhaps you shoud have asked Microsoft to lend you the Bing marketing team. After all, they’ve been able to turn the useless Bing into the third most-used search engine out there, after Google and Yahoo. I’m sure they could help you with a simple name. And I won’t even get into the tagline: “The invisible bond between women.” Really??

Then there’s the website design. The 20-year old college kids who developed your site might be lovely people, and probably very talented in other areas. But next time you have a website developed for you, you might want to have an actual professional do it. You know, someone who’s designed more than just their high school website and MySpace account. Because the mishmash of text and images you threw up there doesn’t scream “cutting edge”, it screams “retinal damage”. Really, really loudly.

But, you protest, what about the content? All that wonderful, wonderful woman-provided content?

Yeh, that. Well, here’s the thing. I’m sure it seemed like a really cool idea at first – the idea that women could submit images, text, and video about “what it means to be a woman”. I’m sure it seemed like it could be “the next Twitter!” And it probably is pretty cool, and you might actually have great content from some great women. But without any way of organizing or filtering it, it’s just a fucking mess. You might not have figured this out yet (I’m not sure how that’s possible, as women have been your target demographic for years), but us women? We’re kinda busy. We don’t have time to figure out where the content is within that unholy crapfest. Clean it up, and maybe we’ll take a look. See, this is why you pay professionals to design your website, instead of your nephew; they would have told you this in the beginning. Before you insulted our sense of aesthetics and our retinas with your insanity.

I will give you credit where credit’s due. This was a brilliant marketing concept. You convinced women, most of whom are probably pretty savvy, to freely and happily volunteer invaluable marketing information on what they think it means to be a women. That’s advertising GOLD, that is. Brilliantly done.

So, in summation? Great concept (from a marketing standpoint, anyway), but the execution was horrifying. Auf Wiedersehen!