No Logo - a Review Naomi Klein's best selling book

No Logo has been described as 'the Bible of anti-corporate Militancy'. In it Klein sets out her thesis under four headings:

· No space - an account of the power of global brands.
· No choice - concentration of power in retailing leading to restriction of consumer choice.
· No jobs - as investment switches from investing in production facilities and labour to spending on marketing, mergers and brand management.
· No logo - how and why there is a political reaction against global corporate power.

Klein's work is based on extensive research including field studies of working conditions in the developing countries. There is no doubt that she gives an accurate account of a great deal of exploitative corporate activity.

She begins with a graphic account of de-industrialization as it has affected the garment manufacturing district of Toronto where erstwhile factories and workshops are now being converted into loft style apartments or workshops and business premises for artists, graphic designers, yoga instructors or film producers. (She evidently regards these occupations as in some sense less worthy than making things. Nevertheless as in London, New York or Paris these are the types of occupation being followed by the sons and daughters of those who once worked in the manufacturing industries). The few workers left in the garment trade are elderly and she contrasts this with the youth of the garment workers in countries like Indonesia who are working for sub contractors of Nike, the Gap or Liz Claiborne, earning less than US$2 a day. Here and elsewhere in Asia she encountered working conditions very similar to those which prevailed in the factories and sweatshops of Britain and America around 100 years ago or in countries like Hong Kong or Singapore less than 50 years ago.

She accuses multinational corporations such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, McDonalds and, above all, Nike of being engaged in a process of 'mining the planet's poorest back country for unimaginable profits.'

The migration of much manufacturing from the developed to the developing world has undoubtedly led to the exploitation of labour markets characterised by low wages, poor working conditions and the suppression of trades unions and the campaign inspired by Klein's work to improve these conditions is to be applauded. Nevertheless it must be recognised that the companies involved have had to face the stark alternative - either move manufacturing to areas of low cost labour or go out of business, as has indeed happened in the case of many clothing manufacturing companies. Poor working conditions in Europe and North America in the past did not improve overnight. It took many decades of economic growth, productivity gains, the rise of organized labour, growing regulation of industry by governments and the leadership of a few pioneering progressive companies to produce the conditions that prevail today. Hopefully, the process of improvement in countries like Mexico or China can be worked through in a shorter time frame, but this depends at least as much on the policies and actions of national governments and intergovernmental agencies than on those of corporations.

Her central thesis is that as more people discover the brand name secrets of 'the global logo web' their outrage will fuel the next big political movement 'a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high brand name recognition.

Her prime target is those companies with strong international brands and which, as she sees it, produce brands rather than products. Yet she weakens her case by lumping together all large international companies with strong brands, ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of companies such as Mercedes, Du Pont or GE that are heavily engaged in manufacturing both in their home countries and overseas. She is quite wrong in stating that brands were first developed as a means of enabling consumers to differentiate between mass-produced products that were virtually indistinguishable from each other. The brands I remember from childhood represented goods and products that were quite distinctive in their quality, and value for money. Names such as Cadbury's, Mars, Ovaltine, Singer and Hoover were bywords for quality and better than a written guarantee. She also ignores the key role played in a manufacturing process by product development and design. Her description of what goes on is confined to two activities - making the product and marketing it. But before a product can be made - whether it be a computer chip, a running shoe or an automobile, it has to be designed and developed and it is in the quality of that design and the extent to which it meets consumer expectations that the true value of the associated brand lies. It is naïve in the extreme to believe that strong brands can be built on the basis of advertising and image building alone, although it is true to say that to associate a product with a particular lifestyle or set of aspirations can be an effective marketing tool. In focusing as she does on Nike she has picked a soft target. In this case it may be justifiable to say that the brand is the product. People don't buy trainers they buy Nike and all the associations of sporting excellence that have been built up around that brand. The contrast between the wealth of Nike shareholders and managers and, not least, the sportstars who sponsor the product on the one hand and the young persons who work in the many factories in the developing countries understandably makes people like Klein angry.

The process of building an image of a particular lifestyle or ideal around a product for marketing purposes is not, however, a new one. Why, when we have reason to celebrate do we order Champagne instead of sparkling Chardonnay? It is because clever marketing over many years has led us to associate the brand name 'champagne' with success and happiness. When we drink to the health of the happy couple at a wedding reception from bottles costing up to ten times the cost of a good sparkling wine how many of us stop to think about the hourly wage of the grape pickers on the estates of the great chateaux? Brand symbols - logos - not only act as a means of instant recognition to the prospective purchaser, but also act as a badge of status once purchased. Running right through Klein's book is an underlying assumption that on balance global companies do more harm than good. I would strongly dispute this. To take just a few examples, the cure for river blindness provided free of charge by Merck, the bringing of cheap computing power into millions of homes by companies like Dell, and the joy on a young child's face on entering Disneyworld are each, in different ways, benefits that would not be possible without large scale business. Philip Sadler Philip Sadler's book Building Tomorrow's Company - A Guide to Sustainable Business Success will be published early in 2002