BUSINESS

Brand names? Hate 'em

NO LOGO: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies
By Naomi Klein
Knopf Canada, 490 pages

Last month's historic street confrontations at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle took the world by surprise: Where did all this rage come from? How did it get so well co-ordinated? And why was it directed against a bunch of dry, dull trade experts?

Naomi Klein's trenchant new book, although it went to press too early to mention Seattle, is the perfect introduction to and explanation of those stunning events.

Her thesis is simple: As more people discover the dirty secrets behind the gleaming corporate logos of our time -- Nike, Microsoft, Starbucks, Disney, McDonald's, Gap, Wal-Mart and on and on -- their outrage will fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition targeting the branded transnationals. We've seen the signs already: the pie in Bill Gates's face, the irreverence of Adbusters magazine, the small-town protests against yet another Wal-Mart store. But Klein, a progressively hip Canadian journalist, takes the mounting anecdotal evidence and places it in an analytical context that is articulate, entertaining and illuminating. She is young enough (29) to write about the demographic that is the prime target of the big brands, the hip global teens and Gen-Xers; and her Canadian perspective allows her a spacious view of the terrain that many U.S. critics, obsessed with empire, often lack.

The dirty secrets of the big brands, according to Klein, boil down to: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs. In her No Space section, she shows how education, culture and indeed the whole public sphere have been colonized by the brands, which are no longer selling products but whole lifestyles. The horror stories abound: Pepsi's exclusive contract with 560 Toronto public schools, an "educational unit" for U.S. kids on how to build a Nike sneaker, anti-tobacco protests muzzled at York University and Toronto City Hall during Du Maurier tennis and jazz events. Klein also notes that the campus preoccupation with political correctness and issues of representation played directly into the hands of the big brands, which seized the diversity issue -- United Colours of Benetton, for example -- and created a global "mono-multiculturalism" that suits their marketing to a T.

In No Choice, Klein indicates how the promise of a huge array of consumer choice has been betrayed by mergers, franchising and corporate censorship. Single-brand stores now predominate in many urban centres -- Nike Town, Roots, The Body Shop -- and single-brand pioneer Disney has gone far beyond Disney World to create the Disney Magic cruise ship, and Celebration, Fla., where you can live the complete Disney life. The cultural claustrophobia induced by the brands is worsened by the global policing of their images and logos: Woe betide the rock group that wants to sing about Barbie or the parents in New Zealand who draw a crude Pluto and Donald Duck on a playground mural. Culture, Klein says, has become something you buy at Toys 'R' Us or rent at Blockbuster: "It is not something in which you participate or to which you have the right to respond."

No Jobs tells the by-now-familiar story of the Mexican maquiladoras and the infamous export processing zones (EPZs) spreading like a toxic stain throughout southeast Asia, where the products that prop up the image-based economy of the big brands are produced in slavery-like tax-free havens. Klein makes a dramatic comparison between the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York in 1911, which killed 146 young workers, and a similar fire at the Kader toy factory in Bangkok in 1993, responsible for 188 deaths. While the Triangle fire was a breakthrough event leading to improved working conditions in the U.S. garment industry, the Kader tragedy evoked no response at all. Perhaps, as Klein notes, we would have paid attention if we had seen the soot-covered remains of what the factory produced: "Bugs Bunny, Bart Simpson and the Muppets. Big Bird and other Sesame Street dolls. Playskool Water Pets."

In her final section, No Logo, Klein charts the beginnings of a global backlash, starting with the culture jammers and "hacktivists," fringe artists and politicos who use the brands' obsession with image to launch witty protests against them. "Skulling" is one technique: turning anorexic models on Calvin Klein billboards into death's-heads with a few deft strokes of a magic marker. If a big corporation is stupid enough to sue its critics for libel, it can end up like McDonald's, which sued a pair of protesters in London and ended up with its entrails exposed for 10 years in a British courtroom, winning the legal battle but losing the media war.

At the mainstream level, school boards and local governments around North America are using selective purchasing agreements (modelled on the anti-apartheid campaign) which specify they will not buy products from companies dealing with countries such as Burma or Nigeria. Since people everywhere have some influence on school boards and city halls, this is bound to be a growing battleground in the war against the brands, which have vowed to use everything from the WTO to the courts to quell these upstart citizen initiatives.

The only problem with Klein's impressive book is its design. Printed on heavy paper like a pretentious art catalogue, with a stark black cover, overprocessed photos and illegible page numbers, the book is the very essence of cool. It plays by the brand bullies' rules in order to capture its target market.
Bronwyn Drainie is a Toronto-based writer and broadcaster who prefers her books readable and easy to handle.

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