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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
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