Short Skirt Long Jacket

This one inspired by the song by Cake – Short Skirt, Long Jacket.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7aDstrDMf0

I want a girl
With a mind like a diamond
I want a girl
Who knows what’s best

I want a girl
With shoes that cut
And eyes that burn
Like cigarettes

I want a girl
With the right allocations
Who’s fast and thorough
And sharp as a tack

She’s playing with her jewelry
She’s putting up her hair
She’s touring the facility
And picking up slack

I want a girl with a short skirt and a lonnnng jacket……

I want a girl
Who gets up early
I want a girl
Who stays up late

I want a girl
With uninterupted prosperity
Who uses a machete
To cut through red tape

With fingernails
That shine like justice
And a voice that is dark
Like tinted glass

She is fast and thorough
And sharp as a tack
She’s touring the facility
And picking up slack

I want a girl with a short skirt and a long…. long jacket

I want a girl
With a smooth liquidation
I want a girl
With good dividends

And at the city bank
We will meet accidentally
We’ll start to talk
When she borrows my pen

She wants a car
With a cupholder arm rest
She wants a car
That will get her there

She’s changing her name
From Kitty to Karen
She’s trading her MG
For a white Chrysler LeBaron

I want a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket

05/01/2011

Notes for the turmoil

Inspired by words (below) from the novel-
I Sniff Myself I Stink by Samir Agrawal

This is bizarre. Repellent is each object. I sniff myself I stink. All in here is but a societal run desire killing industry, a marsh pit. Sneak your path out or pave your way in; heaps of men endeavouring to stick their arses to fitting vacancies. There has to be money in other ventures, else what have I to do? Disgrace towards me is easily spilling from eyeballs all around and close. How inconvenient has it turned to put up on this life (un) supporting celestial mess. Why does death arrive only delayed?

12/12/2010

Political Parties as brand names

Why does a core base of voters stay loyal to a Jayalalitha or a Laloo Yadav come what may? Marketers would answer that with a single word: branding. The functional benefit provided by any product makes up only a small part of the brand experience. The real strength of a brand lies in its intangible benefits – the values it represents, which the targeted consumers identify with or aspire to. This projection of the consumer’s aspirations onto the brand – and the resultant vicarious wish fulfillment – is what makes people spend much more money on products than they are intrinsically worth. This value-addition does not take place at the manufacturing stage, it occurs in the consumer’s mind. The same logic explains why a Mayawati or a Mamata have a strong `consumer franchise’ among the disadvantaged, while an Arun Jaitley is the new middle-class pin-up. Brands, thus, typically address specific segments. But many marketers try to expand their base through measures like brand extension. This is vehemently opposed by several corporate gurus, who argue that truly powerful brands have a narrow focus. Brand extension may yield easy money in the short term, but in the long term it erodes brand identity. That hasn’t deterred marketers, with varying results. The debate rages on, and the only consensus is that brand extension is a tricky proposition, especially if it involves extending a mass market brand to a premium category, or vice versa. Handled well, it can yield several new consumers while retaining the brand identity and old loyalists. If things go wrong, though, you could end up with a failed new product and a terminally diluted brand identity.
The dilemma of how to extend a brand without alienating the loyal consumer base is one that political parties are all too familiar with. None more so than the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is trying to reposition itself from being the `Ayodhya temple’ party to a nationalistic, pan-India organisation, while simultaneously keeping the old faithfuls within the fold. Meanwhile the Congress too has seen a steady erosion in its brand value. Once the `mother brand’ which stood for all things for all people, the Congress today finds many of its values usurped by interlopers with clearly defined niches. Developed markets are typically extremely fragmented, with the leading brands not having particularly high market shares. So perhaps we should celebrate the rise of coalition politics as representative of the development of democracy in India. Does that mean that there is no hope for parties with national ambitions? Not really. A brand like `Virgin’ has been put on everything from an airline to soft drinks, because the basic brand value of anti-establishment irreverence can be applied across a broad swathe. In India, several corporate groups have done the same by projecting values – like reliability and trustworthiness – which have relevance across diverse segments. That is also what the Democratic and Republican parties have successfully done in the US, which is why the US may have thousands of brands, but only two major political parties. Of course, dissonance between the brand promise and performance is sternly punished in the US market. Perhaps the absence of a genuinely broad-based consumerist movement in India explains why we are so forgiving of our leaders who routinely fail to live up to their brand promise.