Gah! I’ve been reading this polemic against… well… against everything since the middle of September on my cruise trip. It’s been my on break
reading at work, so progress has been slow because I’ve been reading it in 15 minute chunks of time, and I’m not the swiftest reader anyway.
No Logo is a treatise in four parts: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, and No Logo.
Klein’s first section, No Space, covers the spread of brands in the culture of industrialized countries. The gist of it all is that there is really little cultural space
left that has not fallen to the branding craze. Everything from branded stadiums to branded educational programming. In Klein’s world, this is bad. I tend to agree with her, but I think she does a poor job of explaining why branding is bad. I also don’t think the crisis is nearly so dire as she makes it out to be. In addition, the section veers from branding to encompass pretty much every kind of corporate misdeed possible. Nor does she explain why branding and multinational corporations have become so prevalent. I think these are all serious flaws, though to some degree they should be expected in a polemic. After all, this isn’t really a history.
Branding has its roots in trademark law. Originally, trademarks were a legal way for a business to exclusively identify their products, so that consumers could be assured they knew what they were getting. In other words, if I sold a widget, I could trademark a particular name for my widgets, the Widgerator™. No one else could use Widgerator™ on similar products, on pain of lawsuit. The protection was partially for me as a business owner, but ultimately for buyers of Widgerator™ widgets. Consumers would know that Widgerator™ widgets would work 95% of the time, rather than the normal 45% of the time. If anyone could use the trademark Widgerator™, businesses making the crappy 45% widgets would slap the label on them and everyone wouldn’t know which were the 95% widgets and which were the 45% ones. Make sense?
The brand (neé trademark) Widgerator™ is really a stand-in for the 95% success rate level of quality, and only secondarily meaning anything to do with widgets themselves. Sometime after World War II, companies began to realize that what the brand stood for was more than a quality level. For instance, the Marlboro® man was a rugged individual. Marlboro stands for rugged individuality, a quality that doesn’t really apply to any product. Instead, it’s a state of mind that can be conjured, and when associated with products, gets the consumer of those products to feel as if he/she is partaking of that idea. Was this intentional? To some degree, I’m sure it was. Disney® is your childhood. Nike® is athletic achievement. Porsche® is blow-jobs from models.
Klein rails against the lack of unbranded space. I think there is plenty of unbranded space. It’s simply consumer choice that brands are so ubiquitous. We want to partake in these feelings. And we want them the easy way, rather than going out and becoming them. A few hundred dollars (or a few thousand as the case may be) is a lot cheaper than spending the time and effort to achieve athletically, for instance. And we get all the benefits!
Or so we think. And that’s why I think that branding is bad. Like my days in a disease of the week 12-step meeting in 1990, my fix of good feeling doesn’t last very long and it isn’t sustained. But this isn’t the brands’ fault. By it’s very nature, the brand means nothing about me in reality. At best, it can only mean something about the product, and if I am too stupid or lazy to realize this, simply removing brands from the market won’t get me to a fulfilled life.
In the meantime, there are plenty of unbranded (or more rationally branded) products available. Lots and lots. It’s easy for me to avoid being a walking advertisement. Maybe not quite as convenient as being a brand consumer, but the extra work is not that formidable.
One of the problems with the book is a lack of focus. Rather than focusing exclusively on brands, their ubiquity and their problems, Klein spends quite a lot of ink railing against general corporate misdeeds. Those things must be touched on, particularly given the subjects of subsequent sections, but I think she jumps around so much it’s hard to tell what the real problems are in a logical fashion. Instead, I got a very vague sense of unease about branding and corporate issues. Others of a less skeptical bent might get an overwhelming anger at or distrust with multi-national corporations, but they are going to have a hard time focusing based on this treatise. Should they be against corporations? Or is it branding? Or is it worker rights? Or what? At the end of the No Logo section (and I’ll cover it when I get there), she expresses a good theme that could be a focus, but man I wish she had introduced that theme explicitly and kept tying everything to it.
In the section No Choice
, Klein covers the idea that ubiquitous branding and transnational corporations are promising cultural choice, but in reality are limiting both expression and the means of expression. The former is pretty obvious to anyone who thinks about it. If my expression is limited or defined by brand name consumerism, the content of my expression is pretty limited. I’m defining, labeling, and compressing my ideas and being into a small set of labels. Now, other people are always going to label and compartmentalize me. I’m liberal, white, young, and urban. This is all true and serves as a quick way to identify the being known online as King Rat, but by no means is that the full extent of who I am. There’s a lot more nuance there than meets the eye of the labeler. But other people need shorthand for defining me, because if other people could contain the totality of me, they wouldn’t need me. They must distill me down to pieces they can contain, along with pieces of everyone else they consider. This is all necessary.
But by publicly aligning myself with certain brands, I am putting myself in a box. And worse yet, I am putting myself in a box defined and controlled by someone else, usually marketing an P.R. suits in a corporation. Not just to other people, but to myself. And there is no need for me to limit myself like others need to limit their view of me. Absolutely none.
Let’s assume I am an artist, perhaps an aspiring filmmaker such as a young woman I saw during the previews to a movie last week. She won a contest as an up-and-coming filmmaker, and she expresses this with a short film about… Coke®. She’s limited herself to a set of ideas that are approved by that corporation. And it shows.
The second aspect that Klein deconstructs is the attempts by corporations to control their brand images, and in the process restrict externally the speech and expression that people would like to deliver. Primarily by these corporations suing individuals who use brand images to criticize the corporations and brands themselves. She also covers other attempts by companies to restrict speech of students, for instance, by including language against negative comments in exclusive contracts with universities, or by using the malls’ legal status as private space to exclude dissent. On such attempts, I agree strongly with her assessment, but I disagree with the idea that a corporation’s tactics to prevent culture jammers
from altering corporate branding images are anything more than a speed bump in the free speech road. By any definition, it’s an abrogation of free speech, for sure. But we’ve never really had free speech in any country, particularly the United States. Freedom in expression is a continuum, ranging from a point where all speech is compelled to a point where there are no consequences for anyone saying anything. That a person may be deterred by minor things such as paying damages tells me either that their speech isn’t very valuable to them, or that they aren’t very dedicated to what they say.
The other aspect of the legally prescribed speech that culture jammers
face obstacles expressing is simply that it’s negative speech. Klein doesn’t touch on this at all. By negative speech, I mean that this speech is not something that stands for something, but rather it is speech that stands against something, usually the idea that the brand is trying to convey. For example, by modifying a cigarette billboard, my expression takes a stand against smoking. By it’s very nature, this kind of speech is less creative than positive speech. It defines itself primarily by what it is against. It as much as letting someone else make a statement, and then saying I disagree
. The rest is details. I write this with the full understanding that this review is mostly defining itself against portions of Klein’s dissertation. My creativity is defined by Klein’s. To effectively create something new, I could instead write my own treatise on branding and corporate being (much of which might agree with her take). Such negative
expression is valid, and imparts important information. But were I prevented from this mode, I could just as well write my treatise and run into no difficulties in its dissemination. But such a treatise is harder to do. Jammers who complain they can’t espouse a viewpoint in the face of opposition are either not as dedicated as they think, or not as intellectually hard-working as they think.
The point is valid though. It would be better were brands not so able to control the using of their brand images to their exclusive liking.
In No Jobs
, Klein covers the shift of corporations from being product producers to being brand producers, who sell products on the side under the brands. As such, these companies can view labor as interchangeable and dispensable. They lay off their manufacturing workers and shut down factories. To sell the products from which they must make their money, these corporations contract out to companies who fill manufacturing orders. In the end, you can’t just license a brand; at some point it has to be attached by someone selling a product or service. Otherwise no one would make any money. Ordering their product from someone else means the multi-national doesn’t need to take on any responsibility for the effects of the manufacture of their products. That’s in someone else’s court, despite the exacting details that they control about the product they purchase. It’s simply a matter (to them) of them getting the product they want and not having to worry about the details.
The effect of this is obviously bad in many ways. There is a wholesale flight of manufacturing jobs from the United States, leaving many people here without a steady living wage job. Klein covers the flip side of the economic coin, cheaper goods for U.S. consumers. At least in theory that could be the case, though often the savings doesn’t go into cheaper goods. Instead it goes into P.R. and advertising campaigns, and also into the pockets of the owners of capital. But she doesn’t draw out the reasons for the failure of market economics in that case to provide cheaper goods. Conventional micro-economic theory would be that the pseudo-feeling imparted by the brand has utility to consumers. But is it really that valuable, or are human minds overvaluing this feeling much like we over-value the strange and unusual over the common-place? I’d suppose the latter, but this avenue isn’t explored.
Klein does detail in a better fashion a breakdown in the supplier side of the trade equation. She covers extensively export processing zones (E.P.Z.s) throughout the developing world, and why they aren’t delivering on their promises to the workers and populations they supposedly benefit. Such zones throughout the world receive many exemptions from local laws in order to draw business. Lower minimum wages, lower tariffs, anti-unionization regulations, and more. These things are all supposed to attract businesses and therefore provide an economic benefit to workers. But in reality these businesses use these exemptions to have free rein, and should they start to lose their free rein, they extort better exemptions or move to places that will. And in some cases, they simply close down and re-open under a new name and receive the same benefits.
So what allows this to happen? Someone must be getting a benefit from this beside the business owner. Klein didn’t really explore this either. Are local officials lining their own pockets? Or, as conventional economic theory would predict, are these conditions providing the best available opportunity for the workers? The standard theory would say that if they had a better opportunity, they would take it. I think in many cases, that is true. However, why aren’t their better opportunities? What could provide a better opportunity for these downtrodden workers? This is a policy prescription to which Klein doesn’t really venture. It’s not too surprising though, since Ms. Klein isn’t an economist, and her audience isn’t a group with a lot of training in economic theory.
Klein’s last section, No Logo
is her longest and I think most effective section. Here she examines what has now become the anti-globalization, anti-branding, and anti-corporate movements. It’s a largely uncritical look, but three are some salient points. The most important, I think, is the idea that brands, by needing such a tight control over their image, are providing activists with weapons to bring them down. Nike® depends so much on the clean image that it projects, that sullying that image with pictures of the sweatshops and labor conditions under which its shoes are produced is a potent way to leverage Nike® into behaving in a much better fashion. Nike® comes with its own included method of controlling Nike®, if activists but know how to use it and the media. Much of this section details the activities of these movements. Some of it seems to impute much more importance to the results from these movements (particularly the group Reclaim the Streets), which seem to me to be less effective than she thinks. A lot of this section covers the anti-sweatshop movements, both in the developed world, and the labor organizers in the developing world, the ties between them, and the tactics they use. It’s inspiring in some ways because it shows the promise, and sobering in others because the real changes haven’t been large.
Klein concludes with something I wish she had introduced early and tied to her other sections more tightly. That is, that these movements should not be about better working conditions, better environmental actions, or anti-branding, but instead they should be about giving local people and workers the right to bargain for and determine their own choices. Essentially, for workers, the right to effective unionization. She talks about this in a scattered fashion throughout the book, but had she stated this position early, and explicitly tied every portion to this, I think she would have been more effective as a writer. She also could have shown how workers and citizens could effectively take control. Because, in the end, I agree with this conclusion. And few would disagree that workers should be able to unionize (aside from the idea of forced unionization) or that people should be able to discard brands should they so wish.
Title: No logo : taking aim at the brand bullies
Alternate title: No logo: no space, no choice, no jobs
Author: Naomi Klein
Imprint / publisher: Picador
Format: Paperback
Length: xxiii, 502 p.
Publication date: April 2002
ISBN-10: 0-312-42143-5
Subject: International business enterprises — Political aspects
Subject: International business enterprises — Public opinion
Subject: Brand name products — Political aspects
Subject: Brand name products — Public opinion
LC classification: HD2755.5 .K575 2000b
