![]() This might mean driving down manufacturing costs or changing the artwork or content of products like magazines or albums so they better fit with Wal-Mart's image of family friendliness.Īlso discussed is the way that corporations abuse copyright laws in order to silence anyone who might attempt to criticize their brand. Other chains, such as Wal-Mart, often threaten to pull various products off their shelves, forcing manufacturers and publishers to comply with their demands. ![]() ABC News, for instance, is allegedly under pressure not to air any stories that are overly critical of Disney, its parent company. ![]() This section also discusses the way that corporations merge with one another in order to add to their ubiquity and provide greater control over their image. Meanwhile, other corporations, such as Sony or Disney, simply open their own chains of stores, preventing the competition from even putting their products on the shelves. Klein argues that each company's goal is to become the dominant force in its respective field. In the second section, Klein discusses how brands use their size and clout to limit the number of choices available to the public – whether through market dominance (e.g., Wal-Mart) or through aggressive invasion of a region (e.g., Starbucks). Klein argues that this is part of a trend toward targeting younger and younger consumers. This section also looks at ways in which brands have "muscled" their presence into the school system, and how in doing so, they have pipelined advertisements into the schools and used their position to gather information about the students. Klein argues that large multinational corporations consider the marketing of a brand name to be more important than the actual manufacture of products this theme recurs in the book, and Klein suggests that it helps explain the shift to production in Third World countries in such industries as clothing, footwear, and computer hardware. Along the way, the brands attempted to associate their names with everything from movie stars and athletes to grassroots social movements. As this happened, the brands' obsession with the youth market drove them to further associate themselves with whatever the youth considered "cool". The book discusses how brand names such as Nike or Pepsi expanded beyond the mere products which bore their names, and how these names and logos began to appear everywhere. According to Klein, in response to an economic crash in the late 1980s (due to the Latin American debt crisis, Black Monday (1987), the savings and loan crisis, and the Japanese asset price bubble), corporations began to seriously rethink their approach to marketing and to target the youth demographic, as opposed to the baby boomers, who had previously been considered a much more valuable segment. These slowly gave way to the idea of selling lifestyles. Early examples of brands were often used to put a recognizable face on factory-produced products. Klein argues that there has been a shift in the usage of branding and gives examples of this shift to "anti-brand" branding. The book begins by tracing the history of brands. The first three sections deal with the negative effects of brand-oriented corporate activity, while the fourth and final section discusses various movements that arose in opposition to the corporate activities discussed in the rest of the book. She goes on to discuss globalization in much greater detail in her book Fences and Windows (2002). While globalization appears frequently as a recurring theme, Klein rarely addresses the topic of globalization itself, and when she does, it is usually indirectly. Many of the ideas in Klein's book derive from the influence of the Situationists, an art/political group founded in the late 1950s. She pays special attention to the deeds and misdeeds of Nike, The Gap, McDonald's, Shell, and Microsoft – and of their lawyers, contractors, and advertising agencies. Throughout the four parts ("No Space", "No Choice", "No Jobs", and "No Logo"), Klein writes about issues such as sweatshops in the Americas and Asia, culture jamming, corporate censorship, and Reclaim the Streets. The book focuses on branding and often makes connections with the anti-globalization movement. First published by Knopf Canada and Picador in December 1999, shortly after the 1999 Seattle WTO protests had generated media attention around such issues, it became one of the most influential books about the alter-globalization movement and an international bestseller. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies is a book by the Canadian author Naomi Klein.
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