“It was precisely their claims of political enlightenment that tempted activists to contrast their marketing image with their labor practices, with disastrous results for the brands.”
To read No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which was published in 1999, is to realize once again how irrevocably 9/11—and the subsequent U.S. response—changed the world. (This point is not lost on the author, who discusses it in an updated afterword.)
Therefore, in reviewing the ideas presented in No Logo, I’ll sketch out an overview of the entire book but focus on the key aspects that I believe are still relevant today.
The book is divided into four sections: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, No Logo. Each bullet below corresponds with one chapter.
No Space
- How companies changed to a mindset of selling brand, rather than product, massively increasing their marketing spend while cutting production costs
- How brands and culture became intertwined
- How youth culture, and especially Black youth culture, was co-opted by brands like Nike and MTV
- How brands expanded into schools and universities
- How brands subsumed identity politics, liberal ideals, and even their own critics in their marketing
“For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.”
— Phil Knight
No Choice
- How blanketing an area (with franchise locations, or really anything) to boost recognition and drive out competition is an effective tactic adopted by brands like Starbucks and Walmart
- How companies merged (and merged) and expanded (and expanded), resulting in complex multinational conglomerates that use synergy across their many companies and brands to outcompete smaller businesses
- How corporate power results in direct and indirect censorship, from “family friendly” requirements for CDs sold at Walmart, to how a news entity like ABC does (or doesn’t) cover its parent company (Disney), to the chilling effect on art and social commentary caused by zealous corporate legal teams
“This is the truly insidious nature of self-censorship: it does the gag work more efficiently than an army of bullying and meddling media moguls could ever hope to accomplish… The underlying message is that culture is something that happens to you… It is not something in which you participate, or to which you have the right to respond.”
—Naomi Klein
No Jobs
- How production moved from developed to under-developed countries
- How a full-time job economy changed to a mix of temp and part-time jobs, as well as unpaid internships that favor the privileged
- How shifts in the job market result in a loss of direct personal loyalty between humans and companies
“This abandonment by brand-name corporations is occurring at the very moment when youth culture is being sought out for more aggressive branding than ever before.”
—Naomi Klein
No Logo
- How “adbusters” of different stripes subvert advertisements and brands
- How the Reclaim the Streets movement has reclaimed public spaces, if temporarily
- How, as power has shifted to huge corporations, activism has also shifted, from political targets to those same companies
- How brands (especially the ones that try to be aspirational or idealistic) have opened themselves up to criticism through their very branding
- Three case studies with lessons learned: Shell (the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the subsequent backlash), McDonalds (the McLibel trial), and Nike (criticism over sweatshops)
- How local governments can attempt to set their own “foreign policy” by refusing to do business with problematic companies
- The limits of brand-based politics
“It is this supreme arrogance that has made brands like Nike and Disney so vulnerable to the two principal tactics employed by anticorporate campaigners: exposing the riches of the branded world to the tucked-away sites of production and bringing back the squalor of production to the doorstop of the blinkered consumer.”
—Naomi Klein
I think the most valuable idea No Logo presents is that corporations, by enmeshing themselves in our culture and linking themselves to our ideals via aspirational branding, have opened themselves to a unique kind of criticism. At the same time, when and where that branding has worked, they’ve achieved unprecedented success.
Some large conglomerates have budgets higher than most nations. Some of the same companies control a significant percentage of the world’s media. Add powerful legal teams and lobbying to the huge heaps of money and mass media outlets, and you get a hell of a lot of power. That’s before you add more subtle and insidious kinds of power, i.e. the ways brands have inserted themselves into nearly every aspect of our lives through tools like ads, sponsorships, and ubiquitous logos.
That’s where branding itself can become the brands’ Achilles heel. A company that presents itself as a source of inspiration can become the target of consumer rage when exposed as a hypocrite. (“Hypocrites are far more interesting than wrongdoers,” says Bama Athreya of the U.S.-based International labor Rights Fund.) This is why Nike has remained a lightning rod for human rights criticism, even when competitors like Reebok and Adidas fall short in the same or similar ways.
That the power of a brand can at times be turned against itself to effect meaningful change, particularly when the message of the brand and the actions of the company are in direct conflict with one another—that’s something worth keeping sharp and at the ready.
