No Logo

‘No Logo’ was a book that defined a generation when it was first published in 1999. For it’s 10th anniversay Naomi Klein has updated this iconic book.

By the time you’re twenty-one, you’ll have seen or heard a million advertisements. But you won’t be happier for it.

This is a book about that much-maligned, much-misunderstood generation coming up behind the slackers, who are being intelligent and active about the world in which they find themselves. It is a world in which all that is ‘alternative’ is sold, where any innovation or subversion is immediately adopted by un-radical, faceless corporations. But, gradually, tentatively, a new generation is beginning to fight consumerism with its own best weapons; and it is the first skirmishes in this war that this abrasively intelligent book documents brilliantly.

We live in an era where image is nearly everything, where the proliferation of brand-name culture has created, to take one hyperbolic example from Naomi Klein's No Logo, "walking, talking, life-sized Tommy [Hilfiger] dolls, mummified in fully branded Tommy worlds." Brand identities are even flourishing online, she notes--and for some retailers, perhaps best of all online: "Liberated from the real-world burdens of stores and product manufacturing, these brands are free to soar, less as the disseminators of goods or services than as collective hallucinations."

In No Logo, Klein patiently demonstrates, step by step, how brands have become ubiquitous, not just in media and on the street but increasingly in the schools as well. (The controversy over advertiser-sponsored Channel One may be old hat, but many readers will be surprised to learn about ads in school lavatories and exclusive concessions in school cafeterias.) The global companies claim to support diversity, but their version of "corporate multiculturalism" is merely intended to create more buying options for consumers. When Klein talks about how easy it is for retailers like Wal-Mart and Blockbuster to "censor" the contents of videotapes and albums, she also considers the role corporate conglomeration plays in the process. How much would one expect Paramount Pictures, for example, to protest against Blockbuster's policies, given that they're both divisions of Viacom?

Klein also looks at the workers who keep these companies running, most of whom never share in any of the great rewards. The president of Borders, when asked whether the bookstore chain could pay its clerks a "living wage," wrote that "while the concept is romantically appealing, it ignores the practicalities and realities of our business environment." Those clerks should probably just be grateful they're not stuck in an Asian sweatshop, making pennies an hour to produce Nike sneakers or other must-have fashion items. Klein also discusses at some length the tactic of hiring "permatemps" who can do most of the work and receive few, if any, benefits like health care, paid vacations, or stock options. While many workers are glad to be part of the "Free Agent Nation," observers note that, particularly in the high-tech industry, such policies make it increasingly difficult to organize workers and advocate for change.

But resistance is growing, and the backlash against the brands has set in. Street-level education programs have taught kids in the inner cities, for example, not only about Nike's abusive labor practices but about the astronomical markup in their prices. Boycotts have commenced: as one urban teen put it, "Nike, we made you. We can break you." But there's more to the revolution, as Klein optimistically recounts: "Ethical shareholders, culture jammers, street reclaimers, McUnion organizers, human-rights hacktivists, school-logo fighters and Internet corporate watchdogs are at the early stages of demanding a citizen-centered alternative to the international rule of the brands ... as global, and as capable of coordinated action, as the multinational corporations it seeks to subvert." No Logo is a comprehensive account of what the global economy has wrought and the actions taking place to thwart it. --Ron Hogan

‘The Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement’ Guardian

‘A riveting, conscientious piece of journalism and a strident call to arms. Packed with enlightening statistics and extraordinary anecdotal evidence, “No Logo” is fluent, undogmatically alive to its contradictions and omissions and positively seethes with intelligent anger.’ Sam Leith, Observer

‘A fascinating ride through the history of marketing…Klein brilliantly humanises “No Logo” with fascinating personal stories, her voice firm but never preachy, her argument detailed but never obscure.’ Alex O’Connell, The Times

‘Naomi Klein brilliantly charts the protean nature of consumer capitalism, how it absorbs radical challenges to its dominance and turns them into consumer products.’ Madeleine Bunting, Guardian

‘A sharp and very timely book … A couple of chapters in, your mind is already reeling … convincing and necessary, clear and fresh, calm but unsparing’ Guardian

‘A manifesto and a call to arms that sometimes reads like an Orwellian nightmare’ Financial Times

There's a bad mood rising against the corporate brands. No Logo is the warning on the label.

Once a poster boy for the new economy, Bill Gates has become global whipping boy. Nike's swoosh - the marketing success of the nineties - is now equated with sweatshop labour, and teenage MacDonald's workers are joining the Teamsters. What is going on? No Logo, an incisive and insightful report from the frontlines of mounting backlash against multinational corporations, explains why some of the most revered brands in the world are finding themselves on the wrong end of a bottle of spray paint, a computer hack, or an international anti-corporate campaign.

No Logo uncovers a betrayal of the central promises of the information age: choice, interactivity, and increased freedom. And as job security disappears, the respectful reverence which corporations enjoyed as engines of the economy is also dissipating - as is their protection from worker and citizen rage.

Equal parts cultural analysis, political manifesto, mall-rat memoir, and journalistic exposé, No Logo is the first book to put the new resistance into pop-historical and clear economic perspective. Naomi Klein tells a story of rebellion and self-determination in the face of our new branded world.

Forget Generation X and say hello to generation Why.. Are you drawn to the shiny surface of pop culture? Have you ever tried to be different but yet sung along to a commercial, bought designer trainers, drunk Coca-Cola or hummed chart music? If you have, you're one of us. In a world in which all that is 'alternative' is sold as soon as it appears, where any innovation or subversion is immediately adopted by un-radical, faceless corporations, gradually, tentatively, a new – our – generation is beginning to fight consumerism with its own best weapons; and it is the first skirmishes in this war that this abrasively intelligent book documents brilliantly. This culture is jamming.

Coloured by compelling, first-hand accounts of – among others – the McLibel trial, Reclaim the Streets, covert ad-busting missions in the 'Export Processing Zone' (i.e. sweatshops outside Manila producing the branded clothes that crowd our shops) 'No Logo' is based on hundreds of interviews, on both sides of the fence, with young activists and advertising executives, with union leaders and corporate directors. It offers a fascinating re-reading of our times.

Equal parts cultural analysis, mall-rat memoir, political manifesto and journalistic expose, 'No Logo' is the first book to attend the birth of the new resistance and the first to put this informed anarchy into pop-historical and clear economic perspective.

Born in Canada in 1970, Naomi Klein is an acclaimed young journalist whose writings have appeared in 'The Baffler, Ms, Village Voice, ' amongst many others. For the last four years she has been covering the rise of anti-corporate activism in her syndicated column in the 'Toronto Star.' This, her first book, provides the first history.

"I've always been drawn to the shiny surfaces of pop culture. When I was a kid I was mesmerised by the 3-D moulded plastic of franchise signs. I would stare at them as our station wagon sped past: Shell, McDonald's, Texaco, Burger King. If I could climb up and touch them it would be like touching something from the world of TC; smooth, flawless, cartoon-like. I did once – somebody gave me a Shell key chain with its very own bright plastic shell. I was so disappointed. It was just a piece of junk."

Naomi Klein is a Canadian writer and journalist. ‘No Logo’ is an international bestseller and has helped define a new generation of young activists.

NEW BRANDED WORLD

As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship? — David Ogilvy, founder of the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency, in Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1963

The astronomical growth in the wealth and cultural influence of multinational corporations over the last fifteen years can arguably be traced back to a single, seemingly innocuous idea developed by management theorists in the mid-1980s: that successful corporations must primarily produce brands, as opposed to products.

Until that time, although it was understood in the corporate world that bolstering one's brand name was important, the primary concern of every solid manufacturer was the production of goods. This idea was the very gospel of the machine age. An editorial that appeared in Fortune magazine in 1938, for instance, argued that the reason the American economy had yet to recover from the Depression was that America had lost sight of the importance of making things:

This is the proposition that the basic and irreversible function of an industrial economy is the making of things; that the more things it makes the bigger will be the income, whether dollar or real; and hence that the key to those lost recuperative powers lies ... in the factory where the lathes and the drills and the fires and the hammers are. It is in the factory and on the land and under the land that purchasing power originates [italics theirs].

And for the longest time, the making of things remained, at least in principle, the heart of all industrialized economies. But by the eighties, pushed along by that decade's recession, some of the most powerful manufacturers in the world had begun to falter. A consensus emerged that corporations were bloated, oversized; they owned too much, employed too many people, and were weighed down with too many things. The very process of producing — running one's own factories, being responsible for tens of thousands of full-time, permanent employees — began to look less like the route to success and more like a clunky liability.

At around this same time a new kind of corporation began to rival the traditional all-American manufacturers for market share; these were the Nikes and Microsofts, and later, the Tommy Hilfigers and Intels. These pioneers made the bold claim that producing goods was only an incidental part of their operations, and that thanks to recent victories in trade liberalization and labor-law reform, they were able to have their products made for them by contractors, many of them overseas. What these companies produced primarily were not things, they said, but images of their brands. Their real work lay not in manufacturing but in marketing. This formula, needless to say, has proved enormously profitable, and its success has companies competing in a race toward weightlessness: whoever owns the least, has the fewest employees on the payroll and produces the most powerful images, as opposed to products, wins the race.

And so the wave of mergers in the corporate world over the last few years is a deceptive phenomenon: it only looks as if the giants, by joining forces, are getting bigger and bigger. The true key to understanding these shifts is to realize that in several crucial ways — not their profits, of course — these merged companies are actually shrinking. Their apparent bigness is simply the most effective route toward their real goal: divestment of the world of things. Since many of today's best-known manufacturers no longer produce products and advertise them, but rather buy products and "brand" them, these companies are forever on the prowl for creative new ways to build and strengthen their brand images. Manufacturing products may require drills, furnaces, hammers and the like, but creating a brand calls for a completely different set of tools and materials. It requires an endless parade of brand extensions, continuously renewed imagery for marketing and, most of all, fresh new spaces to disseminate the brand's idea of itself. In this section of the book, I'll look at how, in ways both insidious and overt, this corporate obsession with brand identity is waging a war on public and individual space: on public institutions such as schools, on youthful identities, on the concept of nationality and on the possibilities for unmarketed space.

The Beginning of the Brand

It's helpful to go back briefly and look at where the idea of branding first began. Though the words are often used interchangeably, branding and advertising are not the same process. Advertising any given product is only one part of branding's grand plan, as are sponsorship and logo licensing. Think of the brand as the core meaning of the modern corporation, and of the advertisement as one vehicle used to convey that meaning to the world.

The first mass-marketing campaigns, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, had more to do with advertising than with branding as we understand it today. Faced with a range of recently invented products — the radio, phonograph, car, light bulb and so on — advertisers had more pressing tasks than creating a brand identity for any given corporation; first, they had to change the way people lived their lives. Ads had to inform consumers about the existence of some new invention, then convince them that their lives would be better if they used, for example, cars instead of wagons, telephones instead of mail and electric light instead of oil lamps. Many of these new products bore brand names — some of which are still around today — but these were almost incidental. These products were themselves news; that was almost advertisement enough.

The first brand-based products appeared at around the same time as the invention-based ads, largely because of another relatively recent innovation: the factory. When goods began to be produced in factories, not only were entirely new products being introduced but old products — even basic staples — were appearing in strikingly new forms. What made early branding efforts different from more straightforward salesmanship was that the market was now being flooded with uniform mass-produced products that were virtually indistinguishable from one another. Competitive branding became a necessity of the machine age — within a context of manufactured sameness, image-based difference had to be manufactured along with the product.

So the role of advertising changed from delivering product news bulletins to building an image around a particular brand-name version of a product. The first task of branding was to bestow proper names on generic goods such as sugar, flour, soap and cereal, which had previously been scooped out of barrels by local shopkeepers. In the 1880s, corporate logos were introduced to mass-produced products like Campbell's Soup, H.J. Heinz pickles and Quaker Oats cereal. As design historians and theorists Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller note, logos were tailored to evoke familiarity and folksiness (see Aunt Jemima, page 2), in an effort to counteract the new and unsettling anonymity of packaged goods. "Familiar personalities such as Dr. Brown, Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, and Old Grand-Dad came to replace the shopkeeper, who was traditionally responsible for measuring bulk foods for customers and acting as an advocate for products ... a nationwide vocabulary of brand names replaced the small local shopkeeper as the interface between consumer and product." After the product names and characters had been established, advertising gave them a venue to speak directly to would-be consumers. The corporate "personality," uniquely named, packaged and advertised, had arrived.

For the most part, the ad campaigns at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth used a set of rigid, pseudoscientific formulas: rivals were never mentioned, ad copy used declarative statements only and headlines had to be large, with lots of white space — according to one turn-of-the-century adman, "an advertisement should be big enough to make an impression but not any bigger than the thing advertised."

But there were those in the industry who understood that advertising wasn't just scientific; it was also spiritual. Brands could conjure a feeling — think of Aunt Jemima's comforting presence — but not only that, entire corporations could themselves embody a meaning of their own. In the early twenties, legendary adman Bruce Barton turned General Motors into a metaphor for the American family, "something personal, warm and human," while GE was not so much the name of the faceless General Electric Company as, in Barton's words, "the initials of a friend." In 1923 Barton said that the role of advertising was to help corporations find their soul. The son of a preacher, he drew on his religious upbringing for uplifting messages: "I like to think of advertising as something big, something splendid, something which goes deep down into an institution and gets hold of the soul of it.... Institutions have souls, just as men and nations have souls," he told GM president Pierre du Pont. General Motors ads began to tell stories about the people who drove its cars — the preacher, the pharmacist or the country doctor who, thanks to his trusty GM, arrived "at the bedside of a dying child" just in time "to bring it back to life."

By the end of the 1940s, there was a burgeoning awareness that a brand wasn't just a mascot or a catchphrase or a ...