In the mid-1990's, anyone who spent much time on college campuses was struck by the ubiquity of spray-painted graffiti urging a boycott of Pepsi products. The stenciled protests attacked the company for producing and selling its soft drinks in Burma, now known as Myanmar, despite the brutal dictatorship there. Yet even a person reasonably well informed about consumer politics had probably never heard a peep about this subject: not in the newspapers, not from Congress, not from personal contact with anyone who refused to drink Pepsi. I half-assumed it was a nasty disinformation tactic from Coca-Cola.
But as Naomi Klein explains in ''No Logo,'' the campaign against Pepsi was the real thing: it began in Ottawa's Carleton University and spread, mostly by Internet, to Harvard and Stanford and to universities in England. By 1997, Pepsi announced ''total disengagement'' from Burma, and the activist network proclaimed: ''We now know we have the grass-roots power to yank one of the most powerful corporations in the world.''
Forced acts of corporate contrition became relatively common in the 1990's -- as Shell, Nike and Kathie Lee Gifford can all attest -- and yet the activism behind them is largely invisible. Isn't the current generation of youth, after all, the most politically passive and consumer-oriented in decades?
Klein's compelling book immerses readers into that apparent contradiction. She ventures into sweatshops in the Philippines, attends classes for anticorporate crusaders and goes ''culture jamming'' with groups who deface billboards in the middle of the night.
Her thesis, which takes too many chapters to develop, is that global corporations are often victims of their own image-building largess. In their brazen attempts to capture the youth market, companies like Benetton, Calvin Klein and Nike have very loudly identified their brands with do-gooder goals like equality and tolerance.
Such bold brand expansions set the bar for corporate behavior quite high. Marketing now adopts ''complex, essential social ideas, for which many people have spent lifetimes fighting,'' Klein explains. ''That's what lends righteousness to the rage of activists campaigning against what they see as cynical distortions of those ideas.''
Global companies now sponsor everything from rock concerts to university chairs to school lunches, worming themselves deeply into consumers' lives and identities. In so doing, Klein demonstrates, companies make themselves vulnerable to backlashes. Had Pepsi not been pushing hard to gain contracts in universities in the mid-90's, it's unlikely that students would have focused on the company's practices abroad.
The book's conclusions are largely grim: Klein links the development of multinational branding to the growth of international sweatshops, corporate censorship and the disappearance of the steady job. She finds some hope in loosely organized protest groups like Britain's Reclaim the Streets, and while the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle happened too late to be included in this volume, they show the potential impact of the movements ''No Logo'' chronicles.
Klein is a gifted writer; her paragraphs can be as seductive as the ad campaigns she dissects. She makes graceful use of disparate source material, gliding naturally from dissenters like William Greider to the editors of Temp Slave magazine, the house organ of the underemployed. And she is careful not to equate her criticisms with a false nostalgia for an ad-free past; instead, Klein takes the fairly unassailable position that our lives ought to have at least some ''unbranded space.''
Yet there's a strange selectivity in Klein's examples that leaves you wondering if she's told the whole story. She spends immense amounts of time analyzing the ''cool'' brands of the early 90's -- Starbucks, Microsoft, Nike -- but fails to train her microscope on such industries as tobacco, liquor, financial services and petroleum (except Shell), none of which have been shy about branding in recent decades.
And there are sections, particularly where Klein ventures into macroeconomics, that cry out for greater rigor. In discussing what she portrays as a decline in the American job market, for example, Klein avoids the debate over increased productivity, as well as the fact that small businesses, rather than brand-crazed multinationals, have been the principal engine of job growth for many years. For Klein to disagree with mainstream economic thinking on such questions could be a virtue; to ignore it is definitely a vice.
Such omissions do not negate Klein's better thinking. They suggest, however, that even the most critical observers of brand theory can become deceived about the real power -- and limits -- of modern corporations.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- James Ledbetter is the New York bureau chief of The Industry Standard and author of ''Made Possible By . . . : The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States.''