Political Penguin

I caught the first twenty minutes or so of Davy boys speech today. I didn’t hang around for its entirety because, well, I had something more important to go and do but I thought I’d pen a few thoughts on the style of the speech.

The first thing that I noticed was not what he was saying but his stage performance. This whole walking around the stage thing I found slightly off-putting but it’s not hard to see where it comes from. Straight out of corporate America and a style much loved by the likes of Steve Jobs CEO of Apple and a whole raft of other IT corporation executives.

I was at one point half expecting him to pull an IPhone out of his pocket call up a big background screen and talk us through all of it’s new features and how it was the embodiment of everything we ever needed in this modern world but ironically that’s exactly what he did, in a political sense.

Davy boy obviously has to try this. In a corporate sense he’s simply trying to place his brand in the right position in the market for it to be successful. Did he succeed? Well, here’s where the Apple analogy comes back.

Much like the Apple IPhone, it looks good, it’s all shiny and has some flash features, well one anyway, but the problem is that it doesn’t seem to have achieved popular appeal. It’s popular among its loyal customer base who will buy it because it’s an Apple but when you lift the lid on it then things look decidedly less impressive.

I’ve got a Nokia E65. It was a free upgrade from my network operators and despite the fact that it’s not flash, it hammers the IPhone into the ground on functionality and technical specification.

Much the same as Cameron has attempted to re-brand the Tory Party. Yes, it looks all shiny and new but when you take a closer look, it’s nothing more than a shiny new veneer on what is essentially an old product that doesn’t stand up against the competition.

I’ll do more on what he actually said in my next post.