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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Feature [published April 2000] Naomi Klein: Ad Nauseum Gary Marshall gets angry about advertising with Naomi Klein’s No Logo “If anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself… there’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourselves – it’s the only way to save your fucking soul.” – Bill Hicks After reading No Logo, you may feel that Bill Hicks was understating things a little: by the end of the first chapter you’ll be en route to the nearest McDonalds with a crate of Molotov cocktails. No Logo is a book about brands, which means it’s a book about popular culture – Golden Arches, the Nike ‘swoosh’, Tommy Hilfiger jackets and Starbucks coffee. It’s about the television you watch and the newspapers you read, the theme parks you visit and the films you go to see. It’s about magazines and rock music, universities and the internet. In short, it’s a book about everyday reality – or, rather, what lies behind it. The connection between brands and corporate irresponsibility has been highlighted before – Nike’s links with third world exploitation are well documented – but No Logo digs much deeper. In an attempt to describe the rise of anti-corporatism and ‘culture jamming’, BUY Naomi Klein books online from and Klein covers issues as diverse as labour rights, censorship and education, and how the rise of the brands has affected them. The resulting book is likely to disturb even the most hardened of cynics. “When deep space exploitation ramps up, it will be corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Philip Morris Galaxy. Planet Starbucks.” – Fight Club In the early chapters of the book, Klein describes the rise of the brands. Originally an importer of cheap Japanese clothing, Nike successfully reinvented itself as a “lifestyle company”, selling an ideal rather than any particular physical product. As Klein reports, the most successful brands don’t actually make anything – from Tommy Hilfiger to Nike, they outsource their manufacturing, and the companies themselves concentrate on the all-important brand ubiquity. Through advertising, the companies encourage people to buy products that act as advertisements for the brand itself, turning a nation into what one executive gleefully describes as “walking billboards”. Levi’s repaints an entire street to promote its Silver Tab jeans, 300 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com footwear companies become synonymous with sporting achievement, and beer companies co-opt music festivals to promote their products. Like the narrator in Fight Club, customers don’t choose products on the basis of price or effectiveness; instead, they ask themselves “what sort of dinner set defines me as a person?” Where No Logo surprises is when it describes the less obvious, and arguably less ethical, forms of brand promotion. According to Klein, companies such as Tommy Hilfiger use black ghettos as seedbeds for their brands, recognising the white middle-class fetish for black urban culture and employing local youths to ‘talk up’ products to their peers. A similar technique was used by the Daewoo car company, which paid students to drive its cars and enthuse about them at every opportunity in an all too real echo of The Truman Show. If you spend any time on the internet, you’ll see entertainment companies doing the same thing on message boards and newsgroups. Klein doesn’t need to lecture you about the increasing ubiquity of sales messages – she lets the facts speak for themselves as she describes universities where Coca-Cola is “the official soft drink”, schools where the mega-brands have their logos on textbooks and toilet cubicles, and university departments wholly reliant on corporate sponsorship. “No Logo demeans the causes it purports to celebrate by offering a narrow, fashion victim’s perspective on BUY Naomi Klein books online from and achievements that have undoubtedly helped to make the world a better place.” – Barry Delaney, creative partner at Delaney Fletcher Bozell, Management Today Where No Logo excels is in the chapters detailing the ‘achievements’ that the above reviewer believes “have undoubtedly helped to make the world a better place”. Klein presents a powerful argument that global brands have resulted in the exploitation of third world workers, increased domestic unemployment, reduced domestic wages, and the continual erosion of workers’ rights. One executive responds to calls for a “living wage” by saying, apparently without irony, “while the concept is romantically appealing, it ignores the practicalities and realities of our business environment”. When two McDonalds employees successfully win the right to union recognition – almost unheard of in the fast food industry – the company simply shuts down the branch. Klein argues that McDonalds has deliberately presented itself as a company that employs teenagers while they look for their first ‘real’ job. Despite a workforce that is considerably older and better educated than the pimply youths of repute, this successful image-making enables the company to keep hours and wages at levels which, in any other industry, would attract howls of protest. Klein also describes the conditions inside call centres, which have been described elsewhere as “the dark, satanic mills of the technological revolution”. In Britain, as in America, call centres are one of the 301 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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