From yesterday's editorial:
David Cameron’s Tory conference address was impressive and statesmanlike.
The election battle lines are apparent. On the Conservative side, aspiration and entrepreneurial spirit. On Labour’s side, the debilitating culture of welfarism, with Mr Miliband putty in the hands of union wreckers.
As a matter of fact, the large parties have more or less identical policies on everything; as regards welfare reform, the Tory approach seems to be to give welfare claimants a bit less and welfare-to-work providers a bit more, but that is just nuances.
A left-leaning paper might just as well have written:
Ed Miliband's Labour conference address was impressive and statesmanlike.
The election battle lines are apparent. On the Labour side, hard work and aspiration. On the Conservatives' side, the debilitating culture of entrenched privilege, with Mr Cameron putty in the hands of bankers and large landowners.
Doesn't detract from the fact that they are as bad as - if not somehow worse - than each other.
Friday, 12 October 2012
Splendid bit of Indian Bicycle Marketing in yesterday's Sun
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8 comments:
I googled 'Indian bicycle marketing' as it's a cultural reference I'm unfamiliar with and low and behold the top spots were all monopolised by a certain Mark Wadsworth.
Maverick!
CD, if you go back far enough through the hits, you'll find the explanation. It's about how bicycles were marketed in India.
It's occurred to me that Mac and PC are a bit "indian bicycle". Macs are marketed to people because they're easy to use, which means PC folks look at them as too simple and inflexible, while PCs are marketed to people because of their power, which puts off people who want simplicity.
As it happens, you can do hardcore scientific work and software development on a Mac (they're very common at Google), but you can also use PCs for all that creative stuff, and Windows 7 is pretty easy to use. Oh, and at the heart of both are Intel i3, i5 or i7 processors.
TS, yes, that's another good example. Superficially, Mac is pricey but robert, Windows-PC is cheaper but flakier. But clearly, if you know about computers and software (which I don't), one os probably exactly as good as the other.
Mark,
The main difference is that Apple don't sell at the low end. Buy a £300 Dell Inspiron, and yeah, it ain't as good a laptop as a £1000 Macbook Air.
But, a T Series Thinkpad that costs £800+ is as well-built as a Macbook Air.
TS, yes. And Apple have a sort of 'family' of products (Mac, iPod etc) which only work or synch properly with each other, once you have an Apple product, you have to buy in to the whole range. So you're buying the software as much as the hardware.
I think it's slightly different. No matter who you vote for, the Tories or Labour will get into power, and it's rather difficult for a bright Indian to build a bicycle (he'd almost always be better off buying from the establishment and tinkering). But it's relatively easy to make your own computer, esoteric hardware is easily obtainable online and the only thing that really limits you is other people wanting to receive files in Microsoft Word format.
A better example would be UK utility and telecoms companies, you can switch between them but there's hardly any difference and they all raise prices together.
AHQ, I think I should explain. There are plenty of things where the competing providers have more or less identical products.
With normal marketing, a business emphasises the positive aspects of its own output. And with proper utilities or commodities they compete on price alone.
With Indian bicycle marketing, as practised by UK political parties, they spend a lot of time slagging off the other parties' "products" and never defend themselves against attacks by others.
At its simplest - Labour accuse the Tories of "savage Tory cuts" (which is quite untrue) but the Tories do not deny it, which enables the Tories to get the votes of the small government, anti-welfare people, and Labour gets the votes of the large-state, pro-welfare people.
Were the Tories to deny that there are any "savage Tory cuts" then fewer people would vote for Tory or Labour.
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