No Logo was the book I had long heard about but could not lay my hands on. I was curious about anti-corporate protests: the why, how, and when of it. And the book is exactly about that. In author Naomi Wolf’s words: “This book is not… another account of the power of the select group of corporate Goliaths that have gathered to form our de facto global government. Rather, the book is an attempt to analyze and document the forces opposing corporate rule, and to lay out the particular set of cultural and economic conditions that made the emergence of that opposition inevitable.”

The beginning of branding is examined in Part I: No Space. The first mass-marketing campaigns had more to do with advertising than brand building as we know today. But slowly, the pundits realized they had to do more than just advertise, to seep into the consciousness of the consumer. For that, the brands had to create meanings, had to transcend the mundane product, even be divorced from it, if required. As Nike CEO Phil Knight says, “For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is to market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.”

Part II, “No Choice,” reports on how the promise of a vastly increased array of cultural choice was betrayed by the forces of mergers, predatory franchising, synergy, and corporate censorship.

Part III, “No Jobs,” examines the labor market trends that are creating increasingly tenuous relationships to employment for many workers, including self-employment. Here is where Klein makes her point. While the ad spends of companies went through the sky, the workers’ compensation sunk deep down. Smart management meant paying people low wages while making them work extra hard; creating temp jobs wherein the company would have to take no responsibility for them. Just use and throw. The sections on Mc Jobs, outsourcing, part-time and temp labor, labor practices followed by the glitzy MNCs in the sweatshops in South East Asia provide the consumer a full view of her favorite brand.

The last section, “No Logo,” discovers an activism that is sowing the seeds of a genuine alternative to corporate rule. Klein reports on various forms of innovative protests such as ad-busting, Reclaim the Street parties, boycotting of brands that follow unethical labor practices in their factories abroad, and the transforming of the McDonalds’ libel into the most publicized negative publicity campaign for it.

To sum it in the words of a critic, “What corporations fear most are consumers who ask questions. Naomi Klein offers us the arguments with which to take on the superbrands.”

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