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

You can see where Klein is going with this. In “No Logo,” she argued that it is not enough for anti-brand activists to coerce a corporation like McDonald’s to fix its environmental problems. Today it is not good enough for Obama to settle for half a loaf when the alternative is going hungry. In both cases, the problem she diagnoses is that a profoundly corrupt system remains intact, and any suggestion that things might have changed for the better is dismissed as more marketing spin.

Still, Klein claims to spy an ironic sort of hope in Obama’s election. Just as the success of socially conscious branding is a sign that there is a longing out there for equality, diversity and public space, the well of hope and expectation that Obama was able to mine is decisive proof that there is still an appetite for social justice. That he has failed to deliver is almost beside the point. The market research is done; all that is left is for genuine transformative social movements to exploit the niche.

This gets the order of exploitation exactly backward. A more likely outcome is something roughly parallel to what happened over the past decade in the consumer realm, where the brand-driven corporate hegemony that “No Logo” so forcefully critiqued came back stronger than ever.

For all its faith in a transformative grassroots political movement, the principal legacy of “No Logo” is that it served as a manual for corporations looking to sell their products to consumers looking for meaning, integrity and purpose in their shopping cart. Klein is still waiting for the revolution, and scarcely seems to notice that she continues to provide invaluable marketing advice to her opponents.

Andrew Potter is co-author of “The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t be Jammed.”

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