No Logo – Naomi Klein: A Review
N.B. This is another one of those lengthy, note-laden reviews for my own records. Also the information is twenty years old so may not be correct now, but was when the book came out.
Date Finished: May 3rd 2020
In No Logo, Klein’s debut work, she charts the rise of superbrands in society like Nike, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Tommy Hilfiger and others; brands that have shed their product-driven cocoons and emerged as conceptual butterflies, hellbent on selling a way of life over material things. But every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and the modern hegemony of superbrands is provoking the rise of anti-corporate movements. Klein takes us within the brand philosophy, the practices that are being used against them, and the arguments against monopolistic branding.
In the ten year anniversary edition, Klein’s foreword ponders the nature of brands in the years following the book’s publication in 2000. She charts the desire for some brands to shed their labels, ala the unbranded bottles of Absolut vodka, or Starbucks stores that pose as independent coffee shops. But the real change is in politics. In No Logo, Klein charts how brands slowly went from merely corporate to political. In the foreword, she shows how politics became corporate, branded. The US presidency, under the Bush administration, outsourced its responsibilities to private contractors and focused on marketing to influence perceptions, first (and unsuccessfully) in wartorn Afghanistan and Iraq, and later with resounding success during the Obama campaign. Klein points out that the Obama administration became famous for its empty symbolic gesture tactics: shutting down Guantanamo Bay whilst expanding prisons in the occupied Middle East, standing against corporate greed whilst handing over more control of the economy to Wall Street insiders. Then there was the open door philosophy of his White House, using the front lawn for receptions for various wholesome, PR friendly groups, inviting the public to see the redecoration of his daughters’ rooms. Ten years on, Obama is still the hip, progressive, accessible intellectual that made him such a popular president, publishing his end of year reading and film lists that I can believe are broadly genuine, but also don’t believe can’t have gone through a focus group.
“The old paradigm has had it that all marketing was selling a product. In the new model, however, the product always takes a back seat to the real product, the brand, and the selling of the brand acquired an extra component that can only be described as spiritual. Advertising is about hawking product. Branding, in its truest and most advanced incarnations, is about corporate transcendence… The brand builders conquered and a new consensus was born: the products that will flourish in the future will be the ones presented not as ‘commodities’ but as concepts: the brand as experience, as lifestyle.”
The difference between a brand and a product is simple: a product is the thing itself, a soft drink or item of clothing or car or what-have-you. A brand is the name associated with it, the idea of the product, and brands are bigger than products because they’re a way of life – at least, according to the CEOS churning out said brands. Virgin is perhaps the best example: there isn’t really any such thing as a Virgin product. You can’t say “I bought a Virgin today”. Rather, Richard Branson slapped his name on a number of ventures, from broadband to an airline to Cola, and thrust them all so aggressively into people’s faces that enough people became familiar with the brand to use it and make it profitable.
Many of the brand’s marketing decisions prove bone-shakingly cringeworthy by modern standards. Adidas ad executives attending a Run DMC gig, Coke trying to appeal to what we would now call hipsters by pretending to broadcast from a pirate radio station called EKOC (Coke backwards), the Nike practice of ‘bro-ing’ (literally going up to black people on the street and showing them trainers they’re supposed to desire). Is it that this past kitsch hasn’t aged well, that advertising has become more sophisticated, or that advertising is forever awful? Again and again throughout the book I found myself thinking of satirical moments in The Simpsons that highlight the absurdity of brands and marketing, and realising the show was far closer to the zeitgeist than I ever realised. When Klein brings up the increase in corporate sponsorship of various public events, it’s hard not to think of the Smithsonian exhibit being sponsored by cellphone company Omnitouch (“But corporate sponsorship cheapens our nation’s treasures” “Actually they’re Omitouch’s treasures now. We bought them during the last budget crisis”) or about fifty other moments from the show.
“A cross between a catalog showroom and an actual living room, the resort has a Roots logo on display in the cabin on pillows, towels, cutlery, plates and glasses. The chairs, sofas, rugs, blinds and shower curtains are all Roots. On the wooden Roots coffee table is a brown leather Roots blotter, gently cradling a flattering book about the Roots story – and you can buy it all to take with you at the Roots store across the way.”
Corporate sponsorship of schools proves a particularly harrowing chapter. In order to advertise to children where they wouldn’t usually be able to reach them, many brands have reached out to schools, particularly in impoverished areas where funding is low, offering to sponsor schools in exchange for certain privileges. The companies K-III Communications and the Youth News Network both sponsored initiatives helping kids make their own news shows to be broadcast in-school, with mandatory ad breaks, of course. One provider of this service, Channel One, was able to charge advertisers double what they’d pay for a television spot for access to a captive audience of around eight million children. The real cornering of the teen market is in food and drink, with Subway, McDonalds, Pizza Hut and others having opened kiosks in 13% of US schools at the time of writing. Meanwhile, Nike had sponsored schools design their own Nikes, both to raise brand awareness and to see if they had any good ideas worth nicking. Many companies conduct similar market research within schools they sponsor, exploiting students by assigning tasks that either aid research (e.g. having kids take photos of their hang-out areas under the guise of photography lessons but in fact helping gather valuable demographic data), or simply having the children design ads and campaigns which could be worth building on. The in-school computer network ZapMe! monitors students browsing habits and sells the data back to corporations. And at universities, sponsor corporations (usually on-campus fast food facilities or sports companies with exclusive contracts) often have gag clauses preventing criticism on campus by students, often rubbing up against politically-minded students eager to raise awareness of the moral failings of many of these companies.
“To achieve this state of oneness, global teens must sometimes be pitted against traditional elders who don’t appreciate their radical taste in denim. For instance, a TV ad for Diesel jeans shows two Korean teenagers turning into birds after they commit double suicide, finding freedom only in the total surrender to the brand. In these ads, the ultimate product – more than the soft drinks, ice creams, sneakers or jeans – is the global teen, who must exist as a demographic in the minds of young consumers worldwide or the entire exercise of global marketing collapses. For this reason, global youth marketing is a mind-numbingly repetitive affair, drunk on the idea of what it is attempting to engineer: a third notion of nationality – not American, not local, but one that would unite the two, through shopping.”
Moving onto corporate synergy and mergers, Klein outlines the backscratching behaviour of brands working together or merging. There’s the obvious synergy: Paramount makes a movie which McDonalds promote with Happy Meal toys, Pepsi offer competition details to win a trip to the premiere, and suchlike. But then there are the more sinister implications of mergers and acquisitions: Paramount owned Blockbuster (it sounds less nefarious now Blockbuster is long dead) meaning they could profit directly from both box office and video rental sales – total monopoly. However, its corporate censorship that proves more troubling: superbrands like Wal-Mart refuse to stock products they deem to be in conflict with their family-friendly image. This has resulted in edited cuts of films being released to appease the monstermart, and even changes to albums (notably Nirvana’s In Utero, which relisted the song “Rape Me” as “Waif Me”). As a result, some artists self-censor to ensure their art will be fit for sale: and given Wal-Mart’s enormous share of the CD market, it’s hard to blame them.
Mergers are at their most sinister when they brush up against news and journalism. ABC’s purchase by Disney has resulted in exposes of Disney being quashed before broadcast. Corporations keen on moving into the opening Chinese market were quick to march to the regime’s rhythm when it came to ensuring the journalistic arms of their conglomerates didn’t go too hard on human rights abuses. Klein is quick to point out that this isn’t as stifling as it may sound: many broadcast platforms have retained their journalistic integrity and are rarely wholly gagged, often publishing material critical of their bosses actions (No Logo itself is published by HarperCollins, owned by the Murdoch business empire, and Klein is no friend of Murdoch), while other arms of the conglomerates cosy up to regimes in other ways. But it demonstrates that even the superbrands know there are limits to how much they get to dictate the rules; there’s only so much good will in the world for them.
Klein moves on to the real world consequences of brand obsession: putting all their money into marketing means far less capital is available for workers and products. Hence, manufacturers have shut down the majority of factories in the US and outsourced to the developing world where conditions are predictably awful: twelve to sixteen hour work days, poverty wages, a lack of basic human rights, total lack of job security, squalid conditions, strict rules around talking and bathroom breaks, and even workers dropping dead of exhaustion, having their menstrual cycles monitored (pregnant workers are unproductive workers, and the majority of these workers are young women) and even giving birth on the factory floor. Talk of unionising can and does lead to the factory shutting down and moving elsewhere, and those who organise may be threatened, beaten or even killed.
“For some companies a plant closure is still a straightforward decision to move the same facility to a cheaper locale. But for others – particularly those with strong brand identities like Levi Strauss and Hanes – layoffs are only the most visible manifestation of a much more fundamental shift: one that is less about where to produce than how. Unlike factories that hop from one place to another, these factories will never rematerialize. Mid-flight, they morph into something else entirely: “orders” to be placed with a contractor, who may well turn over those orders to as many as ten subcontractors, who – particularly in the garment sector – may in turn pass a portion of the subcontracts on to a network of home workers who will complete the jobs in basements and living rooms.”
The remaining jobs in America come with their own issues. Employment relies more and more heavily on the services and retail industries, and yet these are the most insecure, poorly-paid jobs available. Unionisation and striking are heavily curtailed, wages are kept low by employers who define “full-time” as under the required limit for overtime pay and benefits, shifts are unpredictable and unaccommodating for students or mothers with other commitments, and many workers have seen pay cuts even at times of corporate profit growth. Meanwhile, companies are shifting more and more to this precarious work, with Microsoft defining the majority of its workforce as temps so as to keep wages low and avoid providing certain benefits.
“Job creation as part of the corporate mission, particularly the creation of full-time, decently paid, stable jobs, appears to have taken a back seat in many major corporations, regardless of company profits. Rather than being one component of a healthy operation, labor is increasingly treated by the corporate sector as an unavoidable burden, like paying income tax; or an expensive nuisance, like not being allowed to dump toxic waste into lakes. Politicians may say that jobs are their priority, but the stock market responds cheerfully every time mass layoffs are announced, and sinks gloomily whenever it looks as if workers might get a raise. Whatever bizarre route we took to get here, an unmistakable message now emanates from our free markets: good jobs are bad for business, bad for “the economy” and should be avoided at all costs. Although this equation has undeniably reaped record profits in the short term, it may well prove to be a strategic miscalculation on the part of our captains of industry. By discarding their self-identification as job creators, companies leave themselves open to a kind of backlash that can come only from a population that knows that the smooth sailing of the economy is of little demonstrable benefit to them.”
And so we come to the book’s final section: No Logo, where the anti-corporate movements rise. We begin with the ‘culture jammers’ and ‘adbusters’ who use guerrilla tactics to subvert the messaging of adverts. In a tradition dating back to the 1930s, culture jammers now have a new arsenal of techniques thanks to the internet allowing them to convincingly parody ads and twist their messages: from altering tobacco ads to show photos of diseased people, to simply papering over billboards, to emblazoning ads with a particular corporation’s crimes and sins. Then there’s the Reclaim the Streets movement, named after a Parisian protest movement in the ’60s, which began to spontaneously take over public spaces, usually motorways or town squares, in order to hold massive raves and parties in a demonstration of cathartic protest, and to remind people who public spaces should belong to.
Other tactics for raising awareness have included flying sweatshop workers out to the US and recording their reactions when they see the places where the products are sold, and for how much, which has led to some of these workers making public appearances and even speaking of their inhumane conditions in congress. The National Labor Committee under Charles Kernaghan has done brilliant work bringing the issue of sweatshops to mainstream media by juxtaposing logos with the conditions used to make them, making comparisons between, for example, Nike’s advertising budget versus how much its workers make; or the conditions in which Haitian sewing Disney Dalmatian pyjamas work versus the luxury dog condos from the movie. Klein also dips into the international campaigns against Nike (when the black community who have built Nike were informed about Nike’s practices and how it impacted them there were widespread protests outside Nike stores), Shell (two scandals rocked the corporation in the nineties: the Brent Spar incident in which Greenpeace won massive support in demanding that Shell dispose of a defunct oil rig on land rather than sinking it in the ocean, and in its tacit support of the dictatorial regime of General Abacha and the slaughter of the tribal Ogoni people to gain access to oil fields), and McDonalds (in the infamous McLibel case, McDonalds took two activists to court over a pamphlet that had enjoyed a fairly limited circulation and inadvertently made themselves public enemy number one, succeeding in getting the pamphlet translated into twenty-six languages and being distributed globally). Finally, she takes a look at the pitfalls of focusing on visible brands or the “worst offenders” which can let less visible brands, and those whose offences are less well-known off the hook, and how anti-corporate movements can think bigger and broader.
At times, No Logo becomes nightmarishly absurd, as scenes reserved for the pages of satirical novels explode into a plasticky, artificial reality. Perhaps that’s the key here: brands, like satire, are artificial. They don’t square well with reality. There’s the school that had “Coke day” with special guests from Coca-Cola speaking, Coke based lessons, and all the children dressed in Coke t-shirts. One rebellious boy who dared to wear a Pepsi shirt was suspended. Or take Canadian outdoorwear brand Roots Lodge, who designed a resort lodge where every item was branded and available to buy. Such things should be reserved for The Simpsons (which I found myself thinking of every couple of pages) or DeLillo’s White Noise.
With No Logo it’s clear that Klein burst onto the scene with a debut as assured, detailed and readable as any of her later work. Her perspicacity, effortless style and force of intellect make an iffy topic (Brands. Really?) an engaging, outrageous and exhilarating read with plenty of food for thought. My only issue with No Logo is that, at twenty years old, it’s a bit out of date. I would love to see Klein return to the topic again, though it seems she’s done with brands, and I can’t blame her at all. It’s possible to trace some of the legacy of branding and No Logo into the turn of this new decade, and it’s something I might write up in a blog post, but Klein’s take on it would undoubtedly be invaluable. Nevertheless, it remains a prescient and incisive analysis of the corporate takeover of culture, and many of its lessons and insights still apply today.
8/10
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