Failure™ Magazine

Naomi Klein, No Logo

“No Logo” was meant to eradicate “brand bullies.” Instead, it inadvertently became the most influential marketing manual of our time.

Written by Andrew Potter   Filed under Business, Life

Yet Klein is still not happy. In a remarkably self-aware passage, she points out that there has to be more to environmentalism than an Energy Saver sticker on your computer monitor, and more to social justice than a Fair Trade logo on your coffee mug. The danger, she says, is that if all politics becomes absorbed into consumer politics, you end up with the wholesale privatization of what was once the democratic responsibility of the public sphere.

That is why Klein is so unappreciative of what would appear to be a great triumph for her side. Her goal was never to merely change corporate behavior; it was to change the entire economic system. As she sees it, the newfound emphasis on selling authenticity is just further evidence of the ability of capitalism to co-opt dissent and exploit seemingly subversive niches. As Klein stresses, writing about branding was merely an excuse to discuss politics, and what led her to re-engage with the discourse of marketing was the emergence of the first U.S. president who is also a “superbrand.”

In her new introduction, Klein denounces Barack Obama as little more than a neo-con who has wrapped himself in the branding of a truly transformative political movement. As far as she is concerned, the Obama brand circa 2009 is just as hollow—and ultimately as inauthentic—as the corporate brands she X-rayed a decade earlier. Whenever possible, she alleges, Obama “favors the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change.” He was happy to play the role of the “anti-war, anti-Wall Street party crasher” when running for the Democratic nomination, but promptly cut bipartisan deals “with crazed Republicans once in the White House.”

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