In the last twenty years, No Logo has become a standard of political, economic and social critical analysis. It vividly documents the invasive economic practices and damaging social effects of the ruthless corporatism that characterizes many of our powerful institutions.
It tells a story of rebellious rage and self-determination in the face of our branded world, calling for a more just, sustainable economic model and a new kind of proactive internationalism.
In , Time magazine named it as one of the Top non-fiction books published since A tenth anniversary edition of No Logo was published worldwide in The Literary Review of Canada has named it one of the hundred most important Canadian books ever published.
In , for their th anniversary, UK publisher Harper Collins listed it as one of their top books published in the year history. A couple of chapters in, your mind is already reeling. Klein can write: favouring informality and crispness over jargon. Packed with enlightening statistics and extraordinary anecdotal evidence, No Logo is fluent, undogmatically alive to the contradictions and omissions, and positively seethes with intelligent anger.
Naomi Klein might just be helping to reinvent politics for a new generation. Fantastic and inspiring. For more information on publishers, please visit Curtis Brown UK. Taking aim at the Brand Bullies. No Logo. About the Book. Reading No Logo back then in my first year at university was hugely formative; the book, mixing eye-opening reportage with sharp-tongued analysis of consumer capitalism, was a bible for understanding the world my generation was growing up in and the motor behind a new kind of grassroots politics.
The book charted the dramatic rise in the west of youth-oriented, cool-hungry consumer capitalism, in which companies sold an idealised lifestyle, not the physical product on the shelf. With the factories and production lines moved out of sight, and out of mind, the superbrands could focus their North American and European operations on ever more elaborate and intrusive marketing schemes and protecting their brand through censorship and legal action. In one infamous case, Disney sued a small-town creche for painting an unauthorised mural of their characters.
Where previous generations had focused on the oppressive strictures of militarism, racism, nuclear power or patriarchy, the superbrands now became synonymous with all that was wrong with the world. No Logo had a global impact far beyond anything Naomi Klein — only 29 at the time and unknown outside her native Canada — had expected. It became a bestseller in the UK among numerous other countries and was translated into more than 30 languages, with more than a million copies in print worldwide.
No Logo inspired numerous musicians and artists: Radiohead were so swayed by the book that they toured Europe in a tent to avoid corporate-sponsored venues and considered naming their album No Logo , before finally alighting on Kid A.
Incredulous, Klein declined. What strikes me, rereading the book now, is not that Klein was wrong in her diagnosis, but that the changes she was documenting are so much worse than we could have ever predicted — from PepsiCo exploring the idea of broadcasting its logos into space to KFC buying festival DJ slots for Colonel Sanders. We have reached an audio-visual climax of total brand dominance, as if Piccadilly Circus or Times Square were simply laboratories for how our world would look in the 21st century.
So what happened to the focused anti-corporate anger Klein describes in the book? The urgency of the anti-war movement absorbed western energies. In South America, India and elsewhere, these movements continued, but the north left them behind. While our minds were elsewhere, the superbrands ramped up their cannibalisation of every aspect of our cultural lives.
Logos hover everywhere we look, like spots in our peripheral vision. It is strikingly rare, in , to encounter an unbranded, unsponsored cultural experience. Every charity is led by its marketing team.
This reaches even more flagrant extremes as the companies that were initially paying for product placement in films and TV programmes become original content-creators. Where once we might have seen Jerry Seinfeld ostentatiously drinking Pepsi and wearing Nike trainers in an episode of his sitcom, we now have Pepsi Max TV and Nike TV channels on YouTube, producing their own content: not just adverts, but short documentaries, featurettes, competitions and interviews, with viewcounts often in the millions.
When the company made headlines last autumn with its Dream Crazy advert that featured NFL star Colin Kaepernick, controversial for kneeling during the national anthem in protest at police racism and brutality, the reports underneath told their own story.
First, the advert was widely reported as appearing in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Just Do It campaign, a landmark purely because it was three decades since a previous ad campaign. Not sales — brand engagement. Not buy trainers.
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