Bully For Her!

Review by Mike Gange

No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies
by Naomi Klein
Knopf , $29.99, 490 pages

Usually, when I review a book, I read it fast. I make notes in the margins and back pages about aspects of the book I liked. I underline passages that I could use in my book review. I prefer to write in the impartial third person.

But No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies by Naomi Klein, threw my game plan right out the window. Klein writes a great story, telling it like she might if she were with the reader in person, candidly, convincingly. I found it impossible to stay dispassionate about her work. I found myself making so many notes in the margins and back pages and underlining so many things that it became difficult to choose just one passage to show her style. I read the book again, something I rarely do these days, because I just wanted to enjoy the message and the style.

Klein is everything teachers want their students to become. She is observant and bright, critical without being cynical or condescending, well spoken and well traveled. Her book is fresh, invigorating, and rousing. Researching the book took Klein, now 30 years old, nearly five years. She is not afraid to name names and cite specific cases that demonstrate the value of her research. Her book is part sociology, part history, part revolutionary.

No Logo is about how our world has changed since brand names like Gap Microsoft, Nike, Adidas and Shell Oil have recently changed their style of advertising. We have gone from ads on billboards, magazines and TV to more aggressive marketing geared towards our youth culture with massive campaigns that include getting cities to rename parks after the companies, re-paving inner city basketball courts, complete with the company logo in-laid in the center and furnishing whole schools and universities with computers or sports items in return for exclusive rights to vending machines for soft drinks.

Klein writes "As the adman ceases to see himself as pitchman and instead saw himself as the philosopher king of commercial culture...the true meaning of brands – or the ‘brand essence’ as it is often called – gradually took the agencies away from individual products and their attributes and toward a psychological/anthropological examination of what brands mean to the culture and people’s lives."

We end up with Tommy Hilfiger sponsoring the tours of those original rebel rockers, the Rolling Stones. We get Wal Mart employees giving out yellow happy faces to every child who comes through the doors, while the corporate head offices cooly and efficiently develop plans to put their parents local stores out of business.. We have Shell Oil drilling in an environmentally sensitive area of Nigeria, and funding the governments and military who are called out to defend the oil company against citizens who are the most likely to be displaced off their land or hurt by the drilling.

Then we have Adidas giving out complimentary shoes to Hip-Hop and Rap groups so they will be influential trend setters for their fans. And Nike, the company that touts itself as the American original from Oregon, sells products for hundreds of dollars in spiffy expensive mall outlets, while paying its third world sweatshop workers pennies per day, keeping them impoverished and uneducated, while forbidding union organizers from talking to the workers.

But Klein does not write No Logo just to expose a litany of gluttony and excess. She writes about cases where whole communities have become active in the revolutionary tactics against industrial giants. She mentions how environmentalists like Greenpeace helped work up a frenzy against the actions of Shell Oil. She details how street artists have begun taking back their culture by ‘jamming’ billboards with graffiti that slants the advertising, and painting out eyes of the often anorexic models to make them look like skulls or death messages.

Unlike so many books that get a look behind advertising today, this is not the same old whine in a different bottle. Klein writes a fresh take on what is happening to our culture and what we can do about it. As a teacher, I hope the kids in high schools will take it as a jumping off point, following Klein’s lead even further.

Mike Gange teaches media studies and journalism at Fredericton High.