No Logo: Taking Aim at The Brand Bullies (Knopf, 1999) by Naomi Klein
Review by Alison Stein Wellner
There's a new kind of global village, and the glue that connects the pieces of the village together is not a government. It's not an airplane. It's not technology. It's the power of marketing, expressed in big powerful brands. Brands like McDonald's, Nike, Coca-Cola. Some of us are the brand consumers, and others of us, in less advantaged nations, are manufacturing the products that will bear the powerful brand names. This web of branding is choking us, choking our culture, choking our choices. It is a new brand of colonialism, where teenagers in Manila build computers that they do not know how to use, or assemble the sporting equipment that they will never have a chance to play with.
"Logos, by the force of ubiquity, have become the closest thing we have to an international language, recognized and understood in many more places than English," writes Naomi Klein, a Canadian journalist who sets out to prove this thesis in her 500 page tome, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Knopf, 1999). "Corporations have grown so big that they have superseded government (unlike governments, they are accountable only to their shareholders). We lack the mechanisms to make them answer to a broader public," she writes. It's rule by corporation, Klein argues, and it's the building of big powerful brands that have got us in this fix.
How did brands come to wield such power? During the 1980's, a rush towards weightlessness occurred, Klein explains. Corporations outsourced their manufacturing and concentrated their efforts on marketing, i.e. brand building. Since marketing, or branding has become their primary business, "these companies are forever on the prowl for creative new ways to build and strengthen their brand images," she writes. "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." This is why today, we have rock concerts where the sponsor is more important than the musicians (brands themselves, as she points out.) It's why corporations are renaming streets, and even whole cities in their image as is the case of Celebration, Florida, the Walt Disney corporate town. It's why brands have pushed into formerly sacrosanct areas, like public schools. And it's why "unmarketed space" has become an endangered species. Brands have become "content providers", putting out their own magazines, and sports have become one huge excuse to show off a Nike swoosh or some other logo. In short, the lines between marketing and hat-which-is-not marketing have disappeared.
Klein paints a claustrophobic picture of the world, where there is no space where we are free of branded people, branded things, branded experience. She also paints a picture of omnipotent corporations shoving this version of reality down hapless consumers' unwilling throats. Klein writes so well, and so persuasively, that is easy to be carried along in the current of her thinking. And yet, her primary thesis that we live in a world that is controlled by powerful brands, powerful logos, is hard to swallow. She fails to fully prove her case. Part of the problem is that she gets carried away in side arguments - about misplaced activism in 1980's, for example. The rest of the problem is that the picture that she paints is in simple black and white - and it's too simple to accurately portray a world that's full of shades of gray.
As the editor of Forecast, a monthly newsletter that monitors consumer demographics for the marketing community, and a contributing editor to American Demographics magazine, I've also had the chance to examine the way consumers interact with brands, and the way brands try to communicate with consumers. And rather than corporations, and their brands wielding enormous power over consumers, I've observed that brands are actually far more likely to get pushed around by consumers. In other words, brands are more like giant wimps.
An illustration: Every month, I write a department piece for American Demographics called "What Works" which is supposed to be a case study of an effective marketing campaign. I've put out calls to public relations offices, asking them to send me their client's success stories. "Deluge me," I've begged. And yet, every month, I have to scramble to find a success story to write about. It's not that I don't get an initial stack of flak pitches. It's that when I ask them to substantiate their "successes" with hard numbers, most successes mysteriously fade away. I believe that the percentage of marketing campaigns that actually fulfill all but the most modest objectives is remarkably small. Human behavior is a complicated brew of motivations, and while marketing does play an important role, it sure ain't witchcraft. Any marketing manager reading Klein's book would wish for the level of control that she ascribes to them and would love for people to be as malleable as Klein suggests.
The true power in the marketing and branding world is consumers. It's consumers that turn brands into superstars over night and it's fickle consumers that change their minds and send brands into the gutter. In fact, many of the center piece mega-brands that Klein highlights in her book have since fallen on the wrong side of the consumer trend cycle. Nike, for example, is suffering because teen styles have turned away from the athletic look. Tommy Hilfiger has lost its cool. The Gap isn't nearly the success story it once was. The reason that we are deluged with marketing messages today isn't because marketing messages are incredibly effective it's because they aren't. It's true that corporations are trying to rise above the clutter that they've created by dreaming up new ways to get their brands into pristine spaces. But as businesses, when those new places for advertising stop working, the advertising will disappear.
Another central idea in No Logo is that everyday consumers (as opposed to activists) are powerless to resist the forces of the mega brand.
"Everyone has, in one form or another, witnessed the odd double vision of vast consumer choice coupled with Orwellian new restrictions on cultural production and public space. We see it when a small community watches its lively downtown hollow out, as big-box discount stores with their 70,000 items on their shelves set up on their periphery, exerting their gravitational pull to what James Howard Kunstler describes as 'the geography of nowhere'. It is there on the trendy downtown main street as yet another favorite café, hardware store, independent book store or art videos house is cleared away and replaced by one of the Pac Man chains: Starbucks, Home Depot, The Gap, Chapters, Borders, Blockbuster."
The homogenization of the world is a worthy point for consideration and debate, but it's the corruption of the cause and effect chain here that left me scribbling question marks in the margins. When Home Depot, Borders, or one of their ilk sets up shop in a town, it's not like they put a drug in the water supply that makes consumers climb in their cars and drive zombie-like to their stores. It's consumers themselves - ourselves - that make the choice to eschew downtown stores and spend our money at the big boxes' cash register. In a free market system, there's obviously something that these big boxes have that we want, and that mom and pop stores weren't able to provide us. It's not just brand image. It's selection and lower prices.
The larger point here is that big brands would not exist if people didn't want them to. They exist at the pleasure of consumers, and will disappear just as rapidly if consumers are displeased. Consumers have shown a remarkable tolerance to handle "branded" space, if there is a quid pro quo. If they can get internet access for free, many consumers will lend their eye-balls to advertisers. If the school can have better computer equipment so students can be prepared for a new economy, many parents and teachers will let lend their children's eyeballs. If consumers don't see the virtue of unbranded space, than why shouldn't corporations jump in with both feet?
There are valid questions about the relationship between consumers and brands, important questions, which were not answered to my satisfaction in this book. Why are consumers willing to tolerate this level of a sponsored life? And at what point will we start to draw the line? If corporations were, in fact, brand bullies, they'd be able to make that decision for us. But they are not, and they will not. To be able to truly assess the impact of brands and branding on our future, we will need to understand the branding will of the people .