No Logo
Meanwhile, other corporations, such as Sony or Disney simply open their own chains of stores, preventing the competition from even putting their products on the shelves. This section also discusses the way that corporations merge with one another in order to add to their ubiquity. Less radical protests are also discussed, such as the various movements aimed at putting an end to sweatshop labour. Klein concludes by contrasting consumerism and citizenship, appropriately opting for the latter.On a more sinister note, it allows greater control over their image. Along the way, the brands attempted to have their names associated with everything from movie stars and athletes to grassroots social movements. Klein argues that large multinational corporations consider the marketing of a brand name to be more important than the actual manufacture of products; this theme recurs in the book and Klein suggests that it helps explain the shift to production in Third World countries in such industries as clothing, footwear, and computer hardware. This section also looks at ways in which brands have muscled their presence into the school system, and how in doing so, they have pipelined advertisements into the schools, and have used their position to gather information about the students.
However, there are future plans to put the book under a copyleft license. She pays special attention to the deeds and misdeeds of Nike, The Gap, McDonalds, Shell, and Microsoft and their lawyers, contractors, and advertising agencies.
Early examples of brands were often used to put a recognizable face on factory-produced products. These slowly gave way to the idea of selling lifestyles.
These include Adbusters magazine and the culture jamming movement, as well as reclaim the streets, and the McLibel trial. But as time went on, what I clearly saw was a movement forming before my eyes. As the Seattle and Washington protests demonstrate, the movement has continued to form. No Logo is copyrighted by Klein and was published by a multinational corporation (a fact that Klein explicitly points out in the book).
Translations from the original English into several other languages have appeared. The first three deal with the negative effects of brand-oriented corporate activity, while the fourth discusses various methods people have taken in order to fight back. The book begins by tracing the history of brands.
First published by Knopf Canada in January 2000, shortly after the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference protests in Seattle had generated media attention around such issues, it became one of the most influential books about the anti-globalization movement and an international bestseller. The book focuses on branding, and often makes connections with the anti-globalization movement. Whether it be through Wal-Mart s colossal status or Starbucks aggressive invasion of a region, the goal is the same.
The result is a new generation of employees who have come to resent the success of the companies they work for. Klein argues that there has been a shift in the usage of branding.
The subtitle, Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies , was dropped in some later editions. Naomi Klein explains her ideas in the 2003 40-minute video No Logo - Brands, Globalization & Resistance, directed by Sut Jhally. . Other chains, such as Wal-Mart often threaten to pull various products off of their shelves, forcing manufacturers and publishers to comply with their demands.
Additionally, companies have produced goods with a No Logo logo on them (other than her publications, Klein does not endorse nor profit from these products). After the book s release, Klein was heavily criticized by the newspaper The Economist, leading to a broadcast debate with Klein and the magazine s writers, dubbed No Logo vs. ABC News, for instance, is allegedly under pressure not to air any stories that are overly critical of Disney, its parent company.
Pro Logo . The 2004 book The Rebel Sell (published as Nation of Rebels in the United States), was heavily critical of No Logo, arguing that turning the attempt to improve the quality of life of the working class into a fundamentally anti-market ideological and a social image is shallow and inherently exploitable by the corporations they claim to attack. The book won the following awards: No Logo was also on the Shortlist of The Guardian First Book Award 2000 . Several imprints of No Logo exist, for example: ISBN 0-676-97130-X (hard cover first edition), ISBN 0-312-20343-8 (hardcover) and ISBN 0-312-27192-1 (paperback). This resentment, along with rising unemployment, labour abuses abroad, disregard for the environment and the ever increasing presence of advertising breeds a new disdain for corporations. The final section of the book discusses various movements that have sprung up during the 90s.
Klein would go on to discuss globalization in much greater detail in her next book, Fences and Windows. The book is divided into four sections: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, and No Logo. Each of the major brands wishes to become the dominant force in its respective field.
Meanwhile, the public is being sold the perception that these jobs are temporary employment for students and recent graduates, and therefore need not offer living wages or benefits. All of this is set against a backdrop of massive profits and wealth being produced within the corporate sector. The term McJob is introduced, defined as a job with low wages that do not keep in line with inflation, poor hours, no benefits and high levels of stress.
As this happened, the brands obsession with the youth market drove them to further associate themselves with whatever the youth considered cool . This might mean driving down manufacturing costs, or changing the artwork/content of things like magazines or albums, so they might better fit with Wal-Mart s image of family friendliness. Also discussed is the way that corporations abuse copyright laws in order to silence anyone who might attempt to criticize their brand. In this section, the book takes a darker tone, and looks at the way in which manufacturing jobs are being moved from local factories to foreign countries, and particularly to places known as export processing zones.
Within these zones there are no labor laws, leading to dire working conditions. The book then shifts back to North America, where the lack of manufacturing jobs has led to an influx of work in the service sector, where most of the jobs are for minimum wage and offer no benefits. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies is a book by Canadian journalist Naomi Klein.
According to Klein, in response to an economic crash in the 1980s, corporations began to seriously rethink their approach to marketing, and began to target the youth demographic, as opposed to the baby boomers, who had previously been considered a much more valuable segment. The book discusses how brand names such as Nike or Pepsi expanded beyond the mere products which bore their names, and how these names and logos began to appear everywhere. When I started this book, she writes, I honestly didn t know whether I was covering marginal atomized scenes of resistance or the birth of a potentially broad-based movement.
Klein argues that this is part of a trend toward targeting younger and younger consumers. In the second section, Klein discusses how brands use their size and clout to limit the number of choices available to the public. Many of the ideas in Klein s book derive from the influence of the Situationists, an art/political group founded in the late 1950s. However, while globalization would appear to be a recurring theme, the topic itself is rarely addressed, and often indirectly.
Throughout the four parts (No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, and No Logo), Klein writes about issues such as sweatshops in the Americas and Asia, culture jamming, corporate censorship, and Reclaim the Streets.
