Just sick of Nike- Author foresees backlash against hip logos, brands CLUB MONACO and Roots move from clothes into home furnishings. Starbucks puts out a magazine called Joe and Microsoft has an on-line journal, Slate. Ralph Lauren markets designer household paints, Nike launches a swooshed cruise ship and auto-parts giant Magna opens a theme park. This is what happens when brand names rule the world. To understand how branding drives the global market, you couldn't ask for a better guide than Toronto writer Naomi Klein. No Logo: Taking Aim At The Brand Bullies (Knopf Canada, $35.95), is a weighty tome, almost 500 pages of facts, charts and passionate argument. Klein, 29, admits she didn't understand branding herself when she started the book four years ago. ``I thought it was the same as advertising,'' she says. ``And I didn't see the connection between labour issues and brand marketing.'' She immersed herself in management books such as The Circle Of Innovation by U.S. guru Tom Peters, an ode to the power of marketing over production. And she travelled to Asian free trade zones to watch factory workers make the finished products of our branded world: Nike running shoes, Gap pyjamas, IBM computer screens, Old Navy blue jeans. While visiting a factory near Jakarta in Indonesia, she quizzed the workers on what brand of garments were being produced. Turned out the label was London Fog. ``A global coincidence, I suppose,'' writes Klein, who was living in a 10-storey warehouse in Toronto's garment district on Spadina Ave. Her landlord had made his fortune manufacturing London Fog overcoats. ``I started to tell the workers that my apartment in Toronto used to be a London Fog coat factory but stopped abruptly when it became clear from their facial expressions that the idea of anyone choosing to live in a garment building was nothing but alarming. ``In this part of the world, hundreds of workers every year burn to death because their dormitories are located upstairs from firetrap sweatshops.'' As she embarked on her journey of awakening, Klein came to the realization that successful corporations produce brands, not products. Nike was the model for others in not owning any factories and having its products made by contractors overseas. ``Whoever owns the least, has the fewest employees on the payroll and produces the most powerful images, as opposed to products, wins the race.'' Such companies establish emotional ties with their customers - the brand as experience as lifestyle. The Body Shop markets an ethical and ecological approach to cosmetics. Nike Inc. aims to enhance people's lives through sports and fitness. International Business Machines Corp. peddles business solutions. Brands extend their reach into the schools, the arts and culture at large, until very little unmarketed space is left. At almost every university in North America, advertising billboards appear on bicycle racks, on benches, in hallways linking lecture halls, in libraries, even in bathroom stalls. And all over the world, universities offer their research facilities, and their academic credibility, for the brands to use as they please. Here Klein turns confessional. As an activist caught up in identity politics in her University of Toronto days, she didn't notice the stealthy creep of branding into the universities. ``I'm proud of the small victories we won for better lighting on campus, more women faculty members and a less Eurocentric curriculum,'' says Klein. ``What I question is the battles we North American culture warriors never quite got around to.'' But today's anti-corporate activism, evidenced by the Battle in Seattle, makes the author hopeful. Devoting the second half of her book to the attack against branding, Klein says the movement is in its early stages but will have staying power. Why? Because corporations have lost the suit of armour that used to protect them from widespread antagonism - their job-creation role. With the conversion of full-time jobs into part-time and casual work, companies have created a population of workers who don't see themselves as lifers and are free to engage in guerilla politics. ``The more ambitious a company has been in branding the cultural landscape, and the more careless it has been in abandoning workers,'' she argues, ``the more likely it is to have generated a silent battalion of critics waiting to pounce.'' Klein infuses her writing with pop culture references to make it more accessible to younger people. But her impressive analytical and writing skills will impress business readers, too. In one of my favourite chapters, on ``brand bombing,'' she explains a local phenomenon that puzzled me. How did Starbucks Corp., which had no cafés in Toronto, suddenly have 100 or more? The company uses a clustering strategy, saturating an area with stores until the competition is so fierce that sales drop even in Starbucks outlets. (Klein includes a graph showing the drop in same-store sales over five years.) Even while cannibalizing its own stores, Starbucks nevertheless takes market share away from independent coffee shops and reaps a long-term branding goal.