No-Brands-Land

Name: Naomi Klein
Occupation: activist and author, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies
Aspiration: "Our intellectual lives and our public spaces are being taken over by marketing ... It's important for any healthy culture to have public space -- a place where people are treated as citizens instead of as consumers."

It's a brand new world -- a world built around brands. Hard-charging, noise-making, culture-shaping brands are everywhere. They're on supermarket shelves, of course, but also in business plans for dotcom startups, in the names of sports complexes, even -- maybe especially -- in the pages of this magazine. As Tom Peters famously wrote in his Fast Company cover story, "You're branded, branded, branded, branded" ("The Brand Called You," August:September 1997).

Naomi Klein doesn't buy it.

She doesn't buy the idea that the best way for companies to sell their products is to unleash hypercharged branding campaigns that forge emotional connections with customers. She doesn't buy the idea that companies should keep searching for ways that their brands can infiltrate a customer's everyday life -- by sticking their logos on clothes, in concert programs, on subway-station walls, even in elementary-school classrooms. Klein does sometimes buy branded products (because, hell, how can you not? And also because she actually enjoys shopping). But she maintains a clear distinction in her own life between who she is and what she buys.

"Our intellectual lives and our public spaces are being taken over by marketing -- and that has real implications for citizenship," Klein says. "It's important for any healthy culture to have public space -- a place where people are treated as citizens instead of as consumers. We've completely lost that space."

If you disagree, Klein says, just look around. We live in an age in which CBS newscasters wear Nike jackets on the air, in which Burger King and McDonald's open kiosks in elementary-school lunchrooms, in which schools like Stanford University are endowed with a Yahoo! Founders Chair. But as brands reach (and then overreach) into every aspect of our lives, the companies behind them invite more questions, deeper scrutiny -- and an inevitable backlash by consumers. "When we go to a mall, we're on corporate turf," Klein says. "We are going to the brands. But when the brands come to our schools or to our community centers, they're coming into a civic sphere where other values prevail -- and they get held to a much higher standard. Companies are taking the risk that people will decide to X-ray their practices."

A 30-year-old Toronto-based activist and journalist, Klein has spent the past five years tracking the growing strategic and cultural importance of brands. Her findings and arguments, which appear in her new book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Picador USA, 2000), fly in the face of most conventional thinking about brands. A lot of people are paying attention. The book has landed on best-seller lists in Canada and in England, has put Klein in high demand as a speaker at college campuses and at grassroots rallies across the United States, and has made her one of the most visible champions for the antisweatshop movement.

Some of Klein's ideas are pretty radical -- but No Logo is not meant to be read as political propaganda. "Maybe I'll find my 'inner manifesto' one day, but I don't think this is it," Klein says. Rather, at a whopping 490 pages, the book more closely resembles a highly readable doctoral dissertation, one that is peppered with both historical references and personal stories. Klein's core argument is fairly simple: Since the mid-1980s, as more and more companies have shifted from being about products to being about ideas -- Starbucks isn't selling coffee; it's selling community! -- those companies have poured more and more resources into marketing campaigns.

To pay for those campaigns, she adds, those same companies figured out ways to cut costs elsewhere -- for example, by using contract labor at home and low-wage labor in developing countries. In the United States, contract labor has given rise to so-called McJobs, which employers and workers alike pretend are temporary -- even when, as is usually the case, those jobs are held by adults who are trying to support families. "The companies that have most aggressively stalked people as consumers are the same ones that, as employers, have abandoned them," Klein says. Overseas, contract labor takes an uglier form: sweatshops. As Klein, who has visited factories in Indonesia and in the Philippines, bluntly puts it, "The branding economy has been built on the back of Third World labor."