No Logo

In Chapter 1 Klein provides a capsular history of the major shift in corporate strategy since the 1980s that has created what she calls a “new branded world.”

What, according to Klein, is a brand? She begins by distinguishing brands from products (3-5). Products are things: goods or commodities created and sold by individuals or businesses in order to fulfill a specific need or want on the part of consumers. By contrast, brands consist of less tangible qualities that are associated with, but not identical to, products: social, cultural, or lifestyle values that are expressed or embodied by goods. For example, Nike does not sell just a sneaker but an entire cluster of concepts and emotions surrounding the ideas of sports, perseverance, and fitness. For Klein, the idea that “successful corporations must primarily produce brands, and not products” has defined the trajectory of modern marketing and consumerism (3).     

This change is most evident in the transformation of advertising. The traditional role of advertising, Klein argues, was to inform the public of a new product that fulfilled a certain function and therefore warranted purchase (5). However, with the rise of industrialization and its capacity to produce uniform goods on a massive scale, companies turned to the notion of a brand identity and accompanying logo to separate their products from those of competitors (6-7). Early examples from the late 19th century include Campbell’s, Heinz, and Quaker Oats. Advertisements imbued otherwise banal, everyday items (soup, ketchup, cereal) with a certain personality meant to be recognized by the average consumer. By the 1940s, advertisers began to speak of an abstract “brand essence” that could be conveyed and sold to the public beyond the simple utility of a product (7). 

According to Klein, the full implications of branding for marketing and advertising did not emerge until the 1980s. More ads meant more sales; corporate expenditures on advertising thus skyrocketed during this period (11). However, the focus on marketing over production suffered an apparent setback in the mid-1990s (12-15). Klein cites the April 1993 the iconic Marlboro cigarette brand’s decision to lower its prices to match generic competitors as a watershed moment (“Marlboro Friday”). Price, and not brand quality or image, seemed to be the most important factor in consumer decision-making, and Marlboro’s stock on Wall Street plunged. If Walmart can produce jeans indistinguishable from those of Levi’s or Tommy Hilfiger, why would anyone pay more for the privilege of a designer logo? The brand was declared dead at the hands of a widespread “bargain craze” (13).

Despite the dramatic example of Marlboro Friday, Klein argues that major brands in the mid-to-late 1990s found ways to not only survive but thrive (15-26). Companies like Nike, Apple, the Body Shop and Starbucks continued to grow by increasing their emphasis on brand identity over actual products. “The brand builders conquered,” she writes, “and a new consensus was born: the products that will flourish in the future will be the ones presented not as “commodities” but as concepts: the brand as experience, as lifestyle” (21). Far from ending, the age of the corporate logo was just entering a new chapter.

This chapter examines the encroachment of brands and corporate marketing into public space as well as into various cultural domains, from TV, movies, and music to sports.

Klein begins by reflecting on the increase in the size of logos on the exterior of clothing over her lifetime (27-28). She remembers when one of her classmates at primary school checked the tags on the shirts of her peers to see whether they were really designer-made. By the 1980s, this procedure was no longer necessary: the display of logos became a focal point on clothing from high-end brands such as Lacoste and Ralph Lauren.  

This increase in the physical presence of logos and corporate messaging corresponds to the growth of branding and sponsorship arrangements. According to Klein, institutions like schools, museums, and broadcasters that found themselves short on funds following the austerity measures of the 1980s began to turn to private benefactors for financial assistance (30-31). Klein notes that spending on sponsorships skyrocketed in the 1990s, emerging as a major domain for international corporate expenditure (34).  

The result was that our society gradually became invaded by more and more advertisements, and the boundary between public culture and private business slowly eroded. For instance, Klein mentions a Levi’s marketing campaign that completely took over the popular Queen St. West neighborhood in Toronto (36-37). There are even fully branded towns like Celebration, Florida (Disney), and Cashmere, Washington (Liberty Orchard candy) (38).

In terms of the cultural sphere, Klein is far from naïve about the longstanding connection between finance and media: “Branding becomes troubling when the balance tips dramatically in favor of the sponsoring brand, stripping the hosting culture of its inherent value and treating it as little more than a promotional tool” (39). Klein lists numerous examples of such unbalanced branding to show the immense appetite of brands to utilize cultural cache for profit, including the release of a book excerpt promoted by Absolut Vodka, the actors from Dawson’s Creek wearing J. Crew clothing both on-air and in the company’s catalogues, and a Tommy Hilfiger-sponsored Rolling Stones tour (39-50).

The bulk of Klein’s analysis in Chapter 2 focuses on Nike (50-61). For Klein, Nike best exemplifies the strategy of the modern “superbrand” (50). The successful partnership between the shoe company and NBA star Michael Jordan demonstrates the capacity of corporations to dissolve the distinction between sponsor and sponsored: “[T]he idea of unbranded space becomes almost unthinkable” (59). Every component of social or cultural production is potentially a marketing opportunity, a possibility that brands are all-too willing to exploit. 

In Chapter 3, Klein turns to corporate co-optation of youth culture, which became particularly acute in the early 1990s.

As Klein notes, the “recession era ‘brand crisis’” (66) certain major companies faced at the beginning of the 1990s coincided with a significant demographic shift: 1992 was the first year since 1975 that the number of teenagers in the United States had increased (69). Not all brands were underperforming—only uncool or unhip brands; others had successfully tapped into the new youth market, Generation X, in order to continue reaping huge profits.

According to Klein, a major shift in corporate strategy occurred during this period: find out what the cool kids find cool in order to sell it back to them and their peers. “Cool hunters” emerged as part of marketing research, looking to align major brands like Reebok and Levi’s with current trends (72-73). In order to capitalize on its popularity with hip hop artists and fans, Tommy Hilfiger transformed itself from the label of preppy “Young Republicans” into the incarnation of “black style” (75-76). Similarly, marketers quickly cannibalized the counter-cultural grunge music scene centered in Seattle and involving bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, turning it into yet another passé mainstream fad (82-83).

Because no “indie” trend or anti-establishment lifestyle seems immune to the predations of business, Klein argues that some have chosen to take up what appears to be the only remaining position: camp and irony (77-79). If nothing is authentically edgy or radical for long, then one might as well embrace the explicitly uncool with a superior sense of knowing detachment. Cheesy movies, music, and clothes can be enjoyed if one is adequately aware that he or she is consuming cultural detritus. This is the ultimate result of the corporate “colonization of [. . .] mental space” (66). The only other route, Klein suggests, is a genuine political movement willing to directly confront corporate power instead of acquiescing to it (85).     

Next, Klein examines the invasion of educational spaces by corporate branding and influence. If, as Chapter 3 argues, youth culture is an invaluable source of business and marketing information, then “the brands had to get into the schools,” where young people spend most of their time (87).

According to Klein, funding shortfalls and an increased demand for new, expensive technology for students led educational institutions to seek outside monetary support (88). Initiatives like the student television station Channel One, which featured mandated advertising time; the ZapMe! internet browser that mines student surfing data; cafeteria and vending machine deals with companies like Coke and McDonald’s; and athletic partnerships with Nike and Adidas emerged as valuable private income streams for schools (89-98). “In the eyes of brand managers,” Klein writes, “every lunchroom and classroom is a focus group waiting to be focused” (93).

The role of corporations in education has even extended to research at the university level. Klein cites three instances in which medical findings sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry were suppressed when researchers tried to publish results that reflected poorly on their corporate benefactors (98-101). While these cases were highly publicized, Klein notes that “most corporate interference occurs quietly and with no protest” (101). Indeed, corporations openly pay for endowed academic chairs at schools throughout North America (for example, the Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of Hotel and Restaurant Administration at Washington State University). 

Klein concludes the chapter by posing the conundrum of why the rising influence of brands on education, particularly on university campuses, has gone largely uncontested (102-105). After all, aren’t universities supposed to be hotbeds of leftist, anti-capitalist opposition? Klein suggests that students and faculty were too busy fighting one another in “so-called political correctness wars” to realize the extent of creeping corporate leverage over higher education (104).  

Klein begins this chapter with another personal reflection (107-110). She describes her participation in debates about “identity politics” as a university student during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The key point in these discussions, she says, was the “absence of visible role models occupying powerful social positions” drawn from traditionally underrepresented groups like women, minorities, and the LGBTQ community (108). For Klein, this critique amounted to “transforming the world through pop culture” by ensuring that diverse identities and lifestyles were meaningfully represented in a variety of media, from books to film and television (109). Though an important arena of political struggle, Klein suggests that she and her peers failed to perceive the shifting political and economic conditions that would come to define the era of modern globalization.

Indeed, Klein goes on to argue that “many of our demands for better representation were quickly accommodated by marketers, media makers and pop-culture producers alike” (110). In other words, the logic of branding swiftly incorporated the growing emphasis on diversity from young, radical Gen-Xers like Klein (110-15). As superbrands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola looked to expand into new markets like Asia and the former Soviet bloc, they adopted the discourse of diversity in order to appeal to every potential consumer on the planet (115-18). For Klein, this is best illustrated by the notion of the “Global Teen,” the massive demographic of young people worldwide who have been trained to uniformly respond to the hip marketing power of companies like Nike, Sony, and MTV (118-21).       

According to Klein, then, the radical politics of her generation focused on “the representation of women and minorities within the structures of power, not on the economics behind those power structures” (121). No Logo is designed to expose these economic relations while also chronicling newer forms of resistance that they have engendered.