No Logo Read online

  You might not see things yet

  on the surface, but underground,

  it’s already on fire.

  – Indonesian writer Y.B. Mangunwijaya, July 16, 1998

  For Avi

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  The four-year process of taking No Logo from an idea to a finished book has been exhilarating. It has not, however, been painless and I have relied heavily on the support, understanding and expertise of those around me.

  It has been my great honor to have as my editor Louise Dennys, whose intellectual rigor and personal commitment to freedom of expression and human rights have sharpened the arguments in this book and smoothed my rough edges as a writer. She transformed this book in magical ways.

  My research assistant, Paula Thiessen, has tracked down many of the most obscure facts and sources. For more than two years she worked tirelessly collecting the statistics that make up this book’s many original charts, extracting facts from cagey retail chains and cajoling government agencies around the world to send unpublished reports. She also conducted the book’s photo research and has been a calming influence and supportive colleague during what is often lonely work.

  My agents at the Westwood Creative Artists, Bruce Westwood and Jennifer Barclay, took on what many would have seen as a risky project, with boundless enthusiasm and determination. They searched the international book world for kindred spirits who would not just publish No Logo, but would champion it: Reagan Arthur and Philip Gwyn Jones.

  The exceptional team at Knopf Canada has been warm-hearted and cool-headed no matter what the crisis. I am grateful to Michael Mouland, Nikki Barrett, Noelle Zitzer and Susan Burns, as well as to the talented and dedicated team of editors who have strengthened, polished, trimmed and checked this text: Doris Cowan, Alison Reid and Deborah Viets.

  I am deeply indebted to John Honderich, publisher of The Toronto Star, who gave me a regular column in his newspaper when I was far too young; a space that for almost five years allowed me to develop both the ideas and the contacts that form the foundation of this book. My editors at The Star —Carol Goar, Haroon Siddiqui and Mark Richardson —have been enormously supportive through leaves of absence and even wished me well when I left the column to focus my full attention on this project. The writing for No Logo began in earnest as a piece for The Village Voice on culture jamming and I am indebted to Miles Seligman for his editorial insights. My editor at Saturday Night, Paul Tough, has supported me with extended deadlines, research leads, and No Logo—themed assignments, including a trip to the Roots Lodge, which helped deepen my understanding of the utopian aspirations of branding.

  I received valuable research assistance from Idella Sturino, Stefan Philipa and Maya Roy. Mark Johnston hooked me up in London, Bern Jugunos did the same in Manila and Jeff Ballinger did it in Jakarta. Hundreds of individuals and organizations also cooperated with the research, but a few individuals went far out of their way to ply me with stats and facts: Andrew Jackson, Janice Newson, Carly Stasko, Leah Rumack, Mark Hosler, Dan Mills, Bob Jeffcott, Lynda Yanz, Trim Bissell, Laird Brown, and most of all, Gerard Greenfield. Unsolicited juicy tidbits arrived by post and E-mail from Doug Saunders, Jesse Hirsh, Joey Slinger, Paul Webster and countless other electronic angels. The Toronto Reference Library, the International Labour Organization, the Corporate Watch Web site, the Maquila Solidarity Network, The Baffler, SchNEWS, Adbusters and the Tao Collective listserves were all invaluable to my research.

  I am also grateful to Leo Panitch and Mel Watkins for inviting me to speak at conferences that helped me to workshop the thesis early on, and to my colleagues on the This Magazine editorial board for their generosity and encouragement.

  Several friends and family members have read the manuscript and offered advice and input: Michele Landsberg, Stephen Lewis, Kyo Maclear, Cathie James, as well as Bonnie, Michael, Anne and Seth Klein. Mark Kingwell has been a dear friend and intellectual mentor. Sara Borins was my first and most enthusiastic reader —of both the proposal and the first draft —and it was the ever-fabulous Sara who insisted that No Logo must have a design that matched the spirit of its content. Nancy Friedland, John Montesano, Anne Baines and Rachel Giese stood by me when I was nowhere to be found. My late grand father, Philip Klein, who worked as an animator for Walt Disney, taught me a valuable lesson early in life: always look for the dirt behind the shine.

  My greatest debt is to my husband, Avi Lewis, who for years greeted me every morning with a cup of coffee and a stack of clippings from the business section. Avi has been a partner in this project in every possible way: he stayed up late into the night helping to evolve the ideas in this book; accompanied me on numerous research escapades, from suburban monster malls to Indonesia’s export factory zones; and edited the manuscript with centurion attention at multiple stages. For the sake of No Logo he allowed our lives to be totally branded by this book, giving me the great freedom and luxury to be fully consumed.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  No Logo at Ten

  INTRODUCTION A Web of Brands

  NO SPACE

  ONE New Branded World

  TWO The Brand Expands: How the Logo Grabbed

  Center Stage

  THREE Alt.Everything: The Youth Market and the

  Marketing of Cool

  FOUR The Branding of Learning: Ads in Schools

  and Universities

  FIVE Patriarchy Gets Funky: The Triumph

  of Identity Marketing

  NO CHOICE

  SIX Brand Bombing: Franchises in the Age of

  the Superbrand

  SEVEN Mergers and Synergy: The Creation of

  Commercial Utopias

  EIGHT Corporate Censorship: Barricading the

  Branded Village

  NO JOBS

  NINE The Discarded Factory: Degraded

  Production in the Age of the Superbrand

  TEN Threats and Temps: From Working

  for Nothing to “Free Agent Nation”

  ELEVEN Breeding Disloyalty: What Goes

  Around, Comes Around

  NO LOGO

  TWELVE Culture Jamming: Ads Under Attack

  THIRTEEN Reclaim the Streets

  FOURTEEN Bad Mood Rising: The New

  Anticorporate Activism

  FIFTEEN The Brand Boomerang: The Tactics of

  Brand-Based Campaigns

  SIXTEEN A Tale of Three Logos: The Swoosh, the

  Shell and the Arches

  SEVENTEEN Local Foreign Policy: Students

  and Communities Join the Fray

  EIGHTEEN Beyond the Brand: The Limits of

  Brand-Based Politics

  CONCLUSION Consumerism Versus Citizenship: The

  Fight for the Global Commons

  Notes

  Appendix

  Reading List

  Photo Credits

  NO LOGO AT TEN

  As I write this introduction, thinking about how much branding has changed in ten years, a couple of developments seem worth mentioning off the top. In May of 2009, Absolut Vodka launched a limited-edition line called “Absolut No Label.” The company’s global public relations manager Kristina Hagbard explains that, “for the first time we dare to face the world completely naked. We launch a bottle with no label and no logo, to manifest the idea, that no matter what’s on the outside, it’s the inside that really matters…. We encourage people to think twice about their prejudice, because in an Absolut world, there are no labels.”

  A few months later, Starbucks tried to avoid being judged by its own label by opening its first unbranded coffee shop in Seattle, called 15th Avenue E Coffee and Tea. This “stealth Starbucks” (as the anomalous outlet immediately became known) was decorated with “one-of-a-kind” fixtures and customers were in
vited to bring in their own music for the stereo system as well as their own pet social causes —all to help develop what the company called “a community personality.” Customers had to look hard to find the small print on the menus: “inspired by Starbucks.” Tim Pfeiffer, a Starbucks senior vice president, explained that unlike the ordinary Starbucks outlet that used to occupy the very same piece of retail space, “This one is definitely a little neighborhood coffee shop.” After spending two decades blasting its logo onto 16,000 stores worldwide, Starbucks was now trying to escape its own brand.

  Clearly the techniques of branding have both thrived and adapted since I published No Logo. But in the past ten years I have written very little about developments like these. I realized why while reading William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. The book’s protagonist, Cayce Pollard, is allergic to brands, particularly Tommy Hilfiger and the Michelin Man. So strong is this “morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace” that she has the buttons on her Levi’s jeans ground smooth so that there are no corporate markings. When I read those words, I immediately realized that I had a similar affliction. It was not one of those conditions that you are born with but one that develops, over time, due to prolonged overexposure. I didn’t used to be allergic to brands. As I confess in the pages of this book, as a child and teenager I was almost obsessively drawn to them. But writing No Logo required four years of total immersion in ad culture —four years of watching and rewatching Super bowl ads, scouring Advertising Age for the latest innovations in corporate synergy, reading soul-destroying business books on how to get in touch with your personal brand values, attending corporate seminars on brand management, making excursions to Niketowns, to monster malls, to branded towns. And watching some of the worst movies ever made while taking notes in the dark on product placement.

  Some of it was fun. But by the end, it was as if I had passed some kind of threshold and, like Cayce, I developed something close to a brand allergy. Brands lost most of their charm for me, which was handy because once No Logo was a bestseller, even drinking a Diet Coke in public could land me in the gossip column of my hometown newspaper.

  The aversion extended even to the brand that I had accidentally created: No Logo. From studying brands like Nike and Starbucks, I was well acquainted with the basic tenet of brand management: find your message, trademark and protect it, and repeat yourself ad nauseam through as many synergized platforms as possible. I set out to break these rules whenever the opportunity arose. The offers for No Logo spin-off projects (feature film, TV series, clothing line …) were rejected. So were the ones from the megabrands and cutting-edge advertising agencies that wanted me to give them seminars on why they were so hated (there was a career to be made, I was learning, in being a kind of anti-corporate dominatrix, making overpaid executives feel good by telling them what bad, bad brands they were). And against all sensible advice, I stuck by the decision not to trademark the title (that means no royalties from a line of Italian No Logo food products, though they did send me some lovely olive oil).

  Most important to my marketing detox program, I changed the subject. Less than a year after No Logo came out I put a personal ban on all talk of corporate branding. In interviews and public appearances I would steer discussion away from the latest innovation in viral marketing and Prada’s new superstore and toward the growing resistance movement against corporate rule, the one that had captured world attention with the militant protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. “But aren’t you your own brand?” clever interviewers would ask me endlessly. “Probably,” I would respond. “But I try to be a really crap one.”

  Changing the subject from branding to politics was no great sacrifice because politics was what brought me to marketing in the first place. The first articles I published as a journalist were about the limited job options available to me and my peers —the rise of short-term contracts and McJobs, as well as the ubiquitous use of sweatshop labor to produce the branded gear sold to us. As a token “youth columnist,” I also covered how an increasingly voracious marketing culture was encroaching onto previously protected non-corporate spaces — schools, museums, parks — while ideas that my friends and I had considered radical were absorbed almost instantly into the latest marketing campaigns for Nike, Benetton and Apple.

  I decided to write No Logo when I realized these seemingly disparate trends were connected by a single idea —that corporations should produce brands, not products. This was the era when corporate epiphanies were striking CEOs like lightning bolts from the heavens: Nike isn’t a running shoe company, it is about the idea of transcendence through sports, Starbucks isn’t a coffee shop chain, it’s about the idea of community. Down on earth these epiphanies meant that many companies that had manufactured their products in their own factories, and had maintained large, stable workforces, embraced the now ubiquitous Nike model: close your factories, produce your products through an intricate web of contractors and subcontractors and pour your resources into the design and marketing required to fully project your big idea. Or they went for the Microsoft model: maintain a tight control center of shareholder/employees who perform the company’s “core competency” and outsource everything else to temps, from running the mailroom to writing code. Some called these restructured companies “hollow corporations” because their goal seemed to be to transcend the corporeal world of things so they could be an utterly unencumbered brand. As corporate guru Tom Peters, quoted in this book, put it: “You’re a damn fool if you own it!”

  The frantic corporate quest to get out of the product business and into the ideas business explained several trends at once. Companies were constantly on the lookout for new meaningful ideas, as well as pristine spaces on which to project them, because creating meaning was their new act of production. And of course jobs were getting crummier: these companies no longer saw producing things as their “core” business.

  For me, the appeal of x-raying brands like Nike or Starbucks was that pretty soon you were talking about everything except marketing —from how products are made in the deregulated global supply chain to industrial agriculture and commodity prices. Next thing you know you were also talking about the nexus of politics and money that locked in these wild-west rules through free-trade deals and at the World Trade Organization, and made following them the precondition of receiving much-needed loans from the International Monetary Fund. In short, you were talking about how the world works.

  By the time No Logo came out, the movement the book documents in its nascent form was already at the gates of the powerful institutions that were spreading corporatism around the world. Tens and then hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were making their case outside trade summits and G8 meetings from Seattle to New Delhi, in several cases stopping new agreements in their tracks. What the corporate media insisted on calling the “anti-globalization movement” was nothing of the sort. At the reformist end it was anti-corporate; at the radical end it was anticapitalist. But, as I document in this book, what made it unique was its insistent internationalism. All of these developments meant that when I was on book tour, there were many more interesting things to talk about than logos — like where this movement came from, what it wanted and whether there were viable alternatives to the ruthless strain of corporatism that went under the innocuous pseudonym of “globalization.” It was a thrilling period and on a personal level, I was deeply relieved not to have to read Advertising Age anymore.

  In recent years, however, I have found myself doing something I swore I had finished with: re-reading the branding gurus quoted in this book. Guys like Peters (“Brand! Brand!! Brand!!! That’s the message… for the late ’90s and beyond”) and Scott Bedbury (“a great brand raises the bar —it adds a greater sense of purpose to the experience”). This time, however, it wasn’t to try to understand what was happening at the mall but rather at the White House —first under the presidency of George W. Bush and now under Barack Obama,
the first U.S. president who is also a superbrand.

  There are many acts of destruction for which the Bush years are rightly reviled — the illegal invasions, the defiant defenses of torture, the tanking of the global economy. But the administration’s most lasting legacy may well be the way it systematically did to the U.S. government what branding-mad CEOs did to their companies a decade earlier: it hollowed it out, handing over to the private sector many of the most essential functions of government, from protecting borders to responding to disasters to collecting intelligence. This hollowing out was not a side project of the Bush years, it was a central mission, reaching into every field of governance. And though the Bush clan was often ridiculed for its incompetence, the process of auctioning off the state, leaving behind only a shell —or a brand —was approached with tremendous focus and precision. They were good at this. Explaining his Administration’s mission, Bush’s budget director Mitch Daniels said, “The general idea —that the business of government is not to provide services, but to make sure that they are provided —seems self-evident to me.”

  One company that took over many of those services was Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor. “Lockheed Martin doesn’t run the United States,” observed a 2004 New York Times exposé. “But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it. … It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft.”

  No one approached the task of auctioning off the state with more zeal than Bush’s much-maligned Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Having spent twenty-odd years in the private sector, heading pharmaceutical and technology companies and sitting on the boards of such blue-chip firms as Sears and Kellogg’s, Rumsfeld was steeped in the corporate culture of branding and outsourcing. He entered the Defense Department not with the posture of a public servant but channeling a celebrity CEO —the guy with the guts to downsize and offshore and, most of all, rebrand. For Rumsfeld, his department’s brand identity was clear: global dominance. The core competency was combat. For everything else, he said, sounding very much like Bill Gates, “we should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and effectively.” And channeling Tom Peters, he argued, it’s time “to stop thinking about things, numbers of things, and mass.” Addressing the Department of Defense in September 2001, Rumsfeld wanted to know, “Why is DoD one of the last organizations around that still cuts its own checks? When an entire industry exists to run warehouses efficiently, why do we own and operate so many of our own? At bases around the world, why do we pick up our own garbage and mop our own floors, rather than contracting services out, as many businesses do?” Rumsfeld even went after the sacred cow of the military establishment: health care for soldiers. Why were there so many doctors? Rumsfeld wanted to know. “Some of those needs, especially where they may involve general practice or specialties unrelated to combat, might be more efficiently delivered by the private sector.”