No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies

Naomi Klein
Vintage Canada (2000)
Reviewed by Gary Marshall
Reprinted with Permission from Spike Magazine

After reading No Logo, you may feel that Bill Hicks was understating things a little: by the end of the first chapter you’ll be en route to the nearest McDonalds with a crate of Molotov cocktails.

No Logo is a book about brands, which means it’s a book about popular culture – Golden Arches, the Nike “swoosh”, Tommy Hilfiger jackets and Starbucks coffee. It’s about the television you watch and the newspapers you read, the theme parks you visit and the films you go to see. It’s about magazines and rock music, universities and the Internet. In short, it’s a book about everyday reality – or, rather, what lies behind it.

The connection between brands and corporate irresponsibility has been highlighted before – Nike’s links with third world exploitation are well documented – but No Logo digs much deeper. In an attempt to describe the rise of anti-corporatism and “culture jamming”, Klein covers issues as diverse as labour rights, censorship and education, and how the rise of the brands has affected them. The resulting book is likely to disturb even the most hardened of cynics.

Klein presents a powerful argument that global brands have resulted in the exploitation of third world workers, increased domestic unemployment, reduced domestic wages, and the continual erosion of workers’ rights. One executive responds to calls for a “living wage” by saying, apparently without irony, “while the concept is romantically appealing, it ignores the practicalities and realities of our business environment”. When two McDonalds employees successfully win the right to union recognition – almost unheard of in the fast food industry – the company simply shuts down the branch.

Through advertising, companies encourage people to buy products that act as advertisements for the brand itself, turning a nation into what one executive gleefully describes as “walking billboards”. Levi’s repaints an entire street to promote its Silver Tab jeans, footwear companies become synonymous with sporting achievement, and beer companies co-opt music festivals to promote their products.

Where No Logo surprises is when it describes the less obvious, and arguably less ethical, forms of brand promotion. According to Klein, companies such as Tommy Hilfiger use black ghettos as seedbeds for their brands, recognising the white middle-class fetish for black urban culture and employing local youths to “talk up” products to their peers. A similar technique was used by the Daewoo car company, which paid students to drive its cars and enthuse about them at every opportunity in an all too real echo of The Truman Show. If you spend any time on the Internet, you’ll see entertainment companies doing the same thing on message boards and newsgroups.

Klein doesn’t need to lecture you about the increasing ubiquity of sales messages – she lets the facts speak for themselves as she describes universities where Coca-Cola is “the official soft drink”, schools where the mega-brands have their logos on textbooks and toilet cubicles, and university departments wholly reliant on corporate sponsorship.

Another key area Klein highlights is the increasingly incestuous corporate world, where the same companies own television stations, record companies and newspapers. This “corporate synergy” has an effect on politics. Klein recounts how journalists are expected to give certain politicians an easy ride if those politicians are responsible for handing out valuable broadcasting licences to a newspaper’s parent company – a tradition that’s also well-established in the UK.

The closing chapters of No Logo investigate the growing number of protests against globalisation, of which the Seattle Riots of late 1999 and the current anti-GM food campaigns have been the most visible. Although both events occurred after the book’s completion, they help to reinforce Klein’s conclusion that the rise of global brands and increasing consumer awareness is leading to a growing backlash.

No Logo is a powerful read. And if you have even the slightest interest in popular culture, it’s an essential one.

To read the full length review click here.