Month: August 2006

Brand Cameron

Dave Cameron seems to be making headway rebranding the Tory party. The Conservatives badly needed an overhaul and, for a while, came close to political oblivion. The Tories have drifted since their election defeat in 1997, getting through a staggering five leaders. By any measure a sign of desperation and weakness.

Cameron is a PR man by trade, having worked as communications director at Carlton. He knows the power of branding and is using sophisticated marketing techniques to re-position the party. he’s doing what Blair did 12 years ago.

Cameron recently launched a mini-manifesto, ‘Built to Last: The Aims and Values
of the Conservative Party’, putting forward a new “sense of direction” for the party. I’ve read it and, although it includes 50 policy proposals, It’s still a bit thin.

It doesn’t convince me they are right for government. it looks more like a corporate brochure, polished by PRs and ad-men. Each proposal carefully targeted at a different section of the market. It’s brochure ware, not a serious bid for government.

There’s an interesting credit tucked away at the bottom of the back page, “Designed by Perfect Day.” A quick visit to their website reveals a design and advertising agency with clients like McDonalds, Coca-Cola and Morgan Stanley. Under ‘Recent Projects’ are case studies covering their work for The David Cameron Campaign and the Conservative Party.

Perfect Day worked on the Cameron election campaign and their case study provides a glimpse of their branding strategy. Brand Cameron, it seems, is based on portraying, “the concepts of ‘honesty’, ‘vision’, ‘future’ and ‘optimism’.” This is classic marketing territory. It applies to soap powder, banks, oil companies and supermarkets and involves developing brand image, value-propositions, brand experience and recognition.

Cameron and the Tory Party are going through a classic re-branding exercise. It’s all about creating a new identity for the party using presentation and clever PR. The problem is they have started from a very weak position. We remember the ‘bad old days of Tory rule’ and the ‘nasty party’ label has stuck. You can just see Cameron surrounded by ad-men and PR executives obsessing over the new Conservative party brand wheel.

The Tories may look different, but it’s the same old party underneath. Cameron’s modernisation has made the old blue-rinse brigade uneasy, and Tebbit is already sniping about change. The new Conservatives just don’t seem convincing. They still look like a party of the past, not the future.

Would you really want Boris Johnson in government ? Just look at his website. He could choose any picture of himself to put on the front page. But, what did he go for ? A daft looking photo of him posing in front of a row of greek busts. hardly an image of a modern, forward looking man who understands the needs of contemporary Britain. He looks like what he is: an Eton educated toff with classical pretensions. We don’t want people like this running the place.

Cameron is a patrician Tory and a glance at the Shadow Cabinet reveals an over-whelmingly white, middle-class group of men. Many are bankers, army officers, career politicans, wealthy heirs and journalists. You have to question how much these people understand about the Britain of today.

The Tories are re-branding, but the bulk of the party remains unchanged. Cameron is currently ahead in the polls, but that is more to do with Labour failures than Tory achievement.

Cameron hasn’t been in parliament 5 years. Has he really got the stature and experience to run the country ? His team badly mishandled the relatively simple task of chosing a Conservative candidate for London Mayor. it doesn’t look good.

Going green, cycling to work (or not as it turns out), hanging out with Nelson Mandela, hugging hoodies and dog sledging in the arctic just aren’t enough to convince millions of people to vote conservative at the next election.

Upgrade

I’ve just upgraded to MovableType 3.31. It wasn’t easy. My technical knowledge was tested by database object driver messages, parsing errors and endless directory permission issues. After a bit of head scratching and quite a lot of swearing, I finally did it.

I learned all about strange things like chmod and cgi scripting. I was editing the .cgi files with Microsofts Notepad. Turned out I was saving the files in the wrong format so the scripts weren’t running. After hunting round on the forums and thinking about it for a while, I eventually searched out Notepad2 and it all worked wonderfully.

Then I hit a barrage of FTP issues, directory permissions and chmod commands. Being a hopeless amateur when it comes to servers, code and scripts, I downloaded the rather wonderful FireFTP which gave me a nice graphical interface to sort it all out.

So, I’m now running the latest version. There are a few publishing issues to sort and more missing pages than I would want. But, bear with me and I’ll work through the final tweaks and get this little blog back on the road.

Conway’s Law

I’ve just come across Conway’s Law which states, organisations that design systems produce systems that are copies of the communications structures of the organisations.

In other words if two teams suffer communications problems on a joint project, that lack of dialogue will be reflected in poor integration between their two components of the application.

Thinking about it, that kinda makes sense and I can think of good examples of how this has played out on projects I’ve worked on.

I particularly like the other interpretation of Conway’s law, ‘in every organization there will always be one person who knows what is going on. That person must be fired’.