No-Brands-Land

Indeed, the conditions of Third World sweatshops are a major focus of Klein's attention. But her reservations about the branding economy are also social and philosophical. "I'm interested in the way that utopian aspirations of branding are affecting our culture," she says. And now, in a rather surreal twist, Klein is being invited to talk to people at the very companies that she criticizes. Her message may not be one that they're eager to hear, but her ideas, coupled with increasing public protests, are so compelling that many businesspeople feel they have no choice but to listen. Klein won't talk to individual companies behind closed doors. "I don't want to be a brand consultant," she says. "I think my ideas are enormously unprofitable. But I do want to talk to businesspeople as citizens."

Recently, Klein had just such an opportunity at an event that was organized by Keith Martin, 37, e-strategist in the e-business group at the Bank of Montreal. Klein and Martin met in 1996, after Klein criticized Martin's employer in a newspaper column. Martin invited her out to lunch ("I wanted to get a better understanding of her perspective," he says), and has followed her work ever since. In June, he asked Klein to speak at a bar in Toronto to a gathering of 65 of his friends and colleagues -- among them executives from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, KPMG, and Nike Canada. Klein joked as she took the floor: "You do know what my book is about, don't you?"

"Most of the people in that audience did not agree with a lot of what Naomi had to say," Martin notes. "But if you're in a company and you want to understand the environment, the number-one thing that you want to get a hold of is why people are critical of your message. And the best way to do that is to listen to people who don't agree with you."

The Culture of Brands, the Branding of Culture

Once upon a time, a company that wanted to associate its brand with a certain strain of popular culture would sponsor an event, or advertise in a magazine that catered to the constituents of that culture. Now, Klein says, brands are the culture: Abercrombie & Fitch has its own magazine, Volkswagen has its own music festival, and Altoids has its own "Curiously Strong" art exhibit. "The problem with sponsored culture is that it indoctrinates everybody into the idea that you can't do anything without the largesse of corporations," Klein says. "You start to think that collectively as citizens you can't even do basic things like have a music festival or a block party -- or educate your kids -- without some sort of sponsorship."

Klein does not fault companies exclusively for extending the power and the reach of their marketing campaigns. The commercial desire for a place to project brands coincides with what she describes as "the starvation of the public sector." The 1980s saw the reduction of government spending for schools and for museums, and made those institutions much too willing, even eager, to partner with private companies. Yet companies took advantage of the needs of those institutions, Klein asserts. And by reaching too far, by overwhelming the civic space with their marketing agendas, companies have not only harmed the institutions with which they've partnered -- they have also made themselves vulnerable.

Klein calls this the "brand boomerang effect." It's a lesson that Nike, hit hard by student protests over how and where it manufactures its shoes, has learned the hard way. "There's an idea that you can't reverse the branding process, but I think [the anti-Nike protests] are an example that you can," Klein says. "It can be not worth it for the companies."

The growing anticorporate backlash is also fed, Klein believes, by the use of -- and the abuse of -- meaningful ideas and images in advertising. "Once a corporation decides that branding is about ideas as opposed to products, then there's this obsession with finding the hot new idea and commodifying it," Klein says. "It's a very predatory process. The disconnect between powerful ideas and powerful imagery, and what they are attached to, leads to a huge amount of alienation. Ideas need to be treated with more respect."

Here, too, Klein doesn't fault only companies. She readily admits that the success of branding is about the failure of social institutions. "We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other," she says. "When Nike says, 'Just do it,' that's a message of empowerment. Why aren't the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?" But, Klein warns, Nike cannot deliver on the meaning that it promises, and neither can any other company. Though advertising might suggest that Apple is selling iconoclasm, not computers -- or that Benetton is selling progressive politics, not sweaters -- Klein begs to differ. In fact, Apple is selling computers, and Benetton is selling sweaters.