No Logo

“Though the words are often used interchangeably, branding and advertising are not the same process. Advertising any given product is only one part of branding’s grand plan, as are sponsorship and logo licensing. Think of the brand as the core meaning of the modern corporation, and of the advertisement as one vehicle used to convey that meaning to the world.” 

Another important conceptual point laid out early on in No Logo is the peculiar strategy of branding. Unlike traditional advertising, which aims to inform consumers about a certain item, branding refers to the broader process by which a corporation accrues various cultural meanings and significations tangentially related to its products. Advertising is just one part of branding, which is, as Klein suggests, in principle without limit. 

“So the real legacy of Marlboro Friday is that it simultaneously brought the two most significant developments in nineties marketing and consumerism into sharp focus: the deeply unhip big-box bargain stores that provide the essentials of life and monopolize a disproportionate share of the market (Wal-Mart et al.) and the extra-premium ‘“attitude’“ brands that provide the essentials of lifestyle and monopolize ever-expanding stretches of cultural space (Nike et al.). The way these two tiers of consumerism developed would have a profound impact on the economy in the years to come.” 

This passage encapsulates the importance of Marlboro Friday for Klein. Following the economic recession of the early 1990s, major companies split into two key categories: low-cost retailers like Walmart and upmarket specialty brands like Nike and Starbucks. While the first group relied on scale to keep costs low, the second prioritized brand imaging in order to maintain higher price points alongside generic competitors (precisely what Marlboro had failed to do).  

“Over the past decade and a half, logos have grown so dominant that they have essentially transformed the clothing on which they appear into empty carriers for the brands they represent. The metaphorical alligator, in other words, has risen up and swallowed the literal shirt.” 

Part of Klein’s historical argument in Part 1 of No Logo is that the emblems of major brands have become more culturally significant, and therefore physically larger, in recent decades. The conspicuous display of logos like the Lacoste alligator or the Nike “swoosh” have become just as important as the products themselves.  

“A company that swallows cultural space in giant gulps, Nike is the definitive story of the transcendent nineties superbrand, and more than any other single company, its actions demonstrate how branding seeks to erase all boundaries between the sponsor and the sponsored. This is a shoe company that is determined to unseat pro sports, the Olympics and even star athletes, to become the very definition of sports itself.” 

Perhaps more than any other single company, Nike is the key illustration of the new model of branding examined by Klein in No Logo. Here she introduces some examples of corporate sponsorship undertaken by Nike in order to have its products, and more importantly its trademark “swoosh,” associated with as many aspects of sports as possible. 

“At about the time of Marlboro Friday, Wall Street took a close look at the brands that had flourished through the recession, and noticed something interesting. Among the industries that were holding steady or taking off were beer, soft drinks, fast food and sneakers—not to mention chewing gum and Barbie dolls. There was something else: 1992 was the first year since 1975 that the number of teenagers in America increased. Gradually, an idea began to dawn on many in the manufacturing sector and entertainment industries: maybe their sales were slumping not because consumers were ‘“brand-blind,’“ but because these companies had their eyes fixed on the wrong demographic prize.” 

This passage captures Klein’s argument about the unique role of Generation X in No Logo. Faced with the largest cohort of teenagers in nearly 20 years, marketers turned to young people as a deep well of purchasing power in the early 1990s. Everything new, cool, and, in the parlance of the day, ““alternative,” became ripe content for branding and advertising. 

“[W]hat is lost as schools ‘pretend they are corporations’ [. . .] is the very idea of unbranded space. In many ways, schools and universities remain our culture’s most tangible embodiment of public space and collective responsibility. University campuses in particular [. . .] play a crucial, if now largely symbolic, role: they are the one place left where young people can see a genuine public life being lived.” 

The encroachment of corporations upon schools, particularly in higher education, is a major theme in No Logo. Here Klein presents her case for how educational institutions serve as a last bastion of true public space and hence why their co-optation by market logic is especially distressing.  

“In this new globalized context, the victories of identity politics have amounted to a rearranging of the furniture while the house burned down.” 

A key autobiographical element of No Logo is Klein’s reflections on the shortcomings of the radical student political scene in which she participated as young person. She argues that the focus of late 1980s and early 1990s activists on identity politics and representation detracted from economic discussions about globalization and the transformation of modern corporations into superbrands.  

“[A]s more and more companies seek to be the one overarching brand under which we consume, make art, even build our homes, the entire concept of public space is being redefined. And within these real and virtual branded edifices, options for unbranded alternatives, for open debate, criticism and uncensored art—for real choice—are facing new and ominous restrictions.” 

This passage provides a good summary of Klein’s thesis in Part 2 of No Logo, “No Choice.” The monopolization of physical and mental space by a small number of major brands has left consumers with few alternatives to multinational chains and little recourse for criticisms of their labor and environmental policies. For Klein, therefore, it is all the more important to oppose further incursions of corporate power into our lives. 

“[M]edia and retail companies have inflated to such bloated proportions that simple decisions about what items to stock in a store or what kind of cultural product to commission—decisions quite properly left to the discretion of business owners and culture makers—now have enormous consequences: those who make these choices have the power to reengineer the cultural landscape.” 

This passage presents Klein’s concern over corporate censorship. With only a handful of major retailers acting as conduits of media and culture in many parts of the United States, their power to block or modify undesirable content takes on new consequences. If, say, Walmart does not want to carry a certain book or album, access to that item becomes very difficult in certain regions.

“‘Products are made in the factory,’ says Walter Landor, president of the Landor branding agency, ‘but brands are made in the mind.’” 

This remark, from branding executive Walter Landor, captures the mentality of the corporate world after Marlboro Friday. The making of actual products is the necessary but unimportant business of workers in factories. The true battlefield for corporate supremacy lies with the hearts and minds of consumers molded by brands. 

“Today’s ‘new deal’ with workers is a non-deal; one-time manufacturers, turned marketing mavens, are so resolutely intent on evading any and all commitments that they are creating a workforce of childless women, a system of footloose factories employing footloose workers.” 

This passage is a good representation of Klein’s argument in Part 3 of No Logo, “No Jobs.” By shifting from a manufacturing to a marketing enterprise, many corporations have divested themselves of accountability for the faraway workforces tasked with creating their physical products. The result is widespread lack of responsibility for conditions in the labor markets upon which multinationals depend for their profits.

“Almost every major labor battle of the decade has focused not on wage issues but on enforced casualization [. . .] All these stories are about different industries doing variations on the same thing: finding ways to cut ties to their workforce and travel light. The underbelly of the shiny ‘brands, not products’ revelation can be seen increasingly in every workplace around the globe. Every corporation wants a fluid reserve of part-timers, temps and freelancers to help it keep overheads down and ride the twists and turns in the market.” 

According to Klein, the obverse of the flight of manufacturing jobs to the developing world is the rise in precarious service and retail positions in developed economies like the United States. Because laws and regulations can only keep wages so low, companies try to diminish labor costs by relying on more and more part-time, occasional, and non-unionized workers who do not qualify for benefits like health insurance. These arrangements keep prices low and profits high. 

“From Starbucks to Microsoft, from Caterpillar to Citibank, the correlation between profit and job growth is in the process of being severed.” 

In the past, large companies presented themselves as beneficial actors committed to bringing jobs and prosperity to the markets in which their products were sold. According to Klein, this connection between profits and job growth began to fray with the “brands, not products” mentality of the 1980s and 1990s. Creating jobs is no longer an important function of a corporation; the imperatives of profit take precedence. 

“Whatever bizarre route we took to get here, an unmistakable message now emanates from our free markets: good jobs are bad for business, bad for ‘“the economy’“ and should be avoided at all costs.”

In this passage Klein succinctly states her main argument in Part 3, “No Jobs,” namely, that stable, well-paying, and unionized work has become a liability to the economy. Employers are therefore justified in taking whatever measures necessary to ensure a cheaper, more precarious workforce. 

“[C]ulture jamming [is] the practice of parodying advertisements and hijacking billboards in order to drastically alter their messages. Streets are public spaces, adbusters argue, and since most residents can’t afford to counter corporate messages by purchasing their own ads, they should have the right to talk back to images they never asked to see.” 

In this passage Klein defines the practice of “culture jamming,” a frequent reference point in Part 4 of No Logo. By manipulating methods of existing corporate messaging like billboards, culture jammers aim to expose the gap between the promises made by brands and their often-unsavory labor and environmental records. 

“Adbusting is not an end in itself. It is simply a tool—one among many—that is being used, loaned and borrowed in a much broader political movement against the branded life.” 

While generally optimistic about anticorporate activism“”, Klein is also careful to offer some criticisms. Here she emphasizes that adbusting, a popular form of culture jamming, is an important but insufficient component of a broader political strategy aimed at countering corporate power and influence.   

“‘They’re getting our jobs’ is giving way to a more human reaction: ‘Our corporations are stealing their lives.’” 

This pithy formulation reflects the growing awareness on the part of people in developed economies about the costs of globalization and the outsourcing of labor. Rather than seeing foreign workers as competitors, individuals in places like the United States and Europe are beginning to recognize that the labor practices of corporations are the real problem. 

“Branding [. . .] has taken a fairly straightforward relationship between buyer and seller and—through the quest to turn brands into media providers, art producers, town squares and social philosophers—transformed it into something much more invasive and profound. For the past decade, multinationals like Nike, Microsoft and Starbucks have sought to become the chief communicators of all that is good and cherished in our culture: art, sports, community, connection, equality. But the more successful this project is, the more vulnerable these companies become: if brands are indeed intimately entangled with our culture and our identities, when they do wrong, their crimes are not dismissed as merely the misdemeanors of another corporation trying to make a buck. Instead, many of the people who inhabit their branded worlds feel complicit in their wrongs, both guilty and connected.” 

This passage summarizes Klein’s overall argument in No Logo. She describes the shift in brand strategy that has allowed corporations to infiltrate wider and wider spheres of society and the backlash that that has created among consumers. This is especially clear when companies are caught engaging in objectionable labor and/or environmental policies.

“Despite the rhetoric of One Worldism, the planet remains sharply divided between producers and consumers, and the enormous profits raked in by the superbrands are premised upon these worlds remaining as separate from one another as possible.” 

Here Klein describes the overarching geopolitical situation engendered by the rise of the modern corporation. For all of the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism and diversity integrated into some marketing campaigns, the global division of labor has in fact enshrined a fundamental inequality in the human species: consumers in affluent nations buy commodities made by producers in poorer nations; the latter receive wages that would essentially constitute slave labor in the developed world. This dichotomy between the global South and North, Klein argues, has ultimately been to the benefit of a small number of people at the top of the corporate hierarchy.   

“If Bret Spar was about loss of space, and Nike was about the loss of good jobs, McLibel was about loss of voice—it was about corporate censorship.” 

This passage provides a helpful summary of Klein’s argument in Chapter 16. The three cases mentioned—the Bret Spar incident involving Royal Dutch/Shell, increasing Nike boycotts, and the McLibel trial—each correspond to one of the first three segments of No Logo: “No Space,” “No Jobs,” and “No Choice.” This scheme of analysis allows Klein to explicitly link some of the major anticorporate campaigns discussed in Part 4 back to her earlier claims in the book.

“[T]he Net is more than an organizing tool—it has become an organizing model, a blueprint for decentralized but cooperative decision making.” 

Klein often emphasizes the immense capacity of the internet to help activists and labor organizers cooperate around the world. Here she extends that point to suggest that the remaking of communication by the internet is also changing the foundations of politics. Instead of a centralized, monolithic notion of power, the internet models a diffuse and diverse form of interaction that is ultimately more cooperative and democratic than many alternatives.   

“When high schools, universities, places of worship, unions, city councils and other levels of government apply ethical standards to their bulk purchasing decisions, it takes anticorporate campaigning a significant step beyond the mostly symbolic warfare of adbusting and superstore protesting. Such community institutions are not only collections of individual consumers, they are also consumers themselves—and powerful ones at that.” 

This passage captures one of Klein’s major arguments in Chapter 17. As large, powerful, and (for the most part) public institutions, schools and local governments can function as key intermediaries between consumers and corporations. Where individual citizens and smaller groups may falter in opposing a big company, schools and local governments are better situated to confront a similarly large, complex organization.   

“The conduct of the individual multinationals is simply a by-product of a broader global economic system that has steadily been removing almost all barriers and conditions to trade, investment and outsourcing. If companies make deals with brutal dictators, sell off their factories and pay wages too low to live on, it’s because there is nothing in our international trading rules to prevent them.” 

Another key proposition of No Logo is that the behavior and practices of major corporations are a straightforward consequence of economic policy. By emphasizing free trade, de-regulating the economy, and undercutting labor unions, governments in developed nations laid the groundwork for the exploitation of workers in developing countries. Thus Klein ultimately argues for a lasting political solution to the social, economic, and cultural problems created by modern superbrands.