No Logo summary

We spend our entire lives surrounded by brands. Our streets and public spaces are peppered with advertisements, our sporting events and heroes sponsored by brands, and even the clothes we wear are often covered by brand names and logos.

Brands are ubiquitous in our culture precisely because, to survive, they need to be constantly and aggressively advertised and marketed. They must constantly align themselves with changing demographics and new trends, such as the rise of alternative music in the early 1990s, otherwise customers become disinterested and the brands die. As one advertising executive stated, “Consumers are like roaches – you spray them and spray them and they get immune after a while.” Levi Strauss, once considered to be one of the coolest brands, failed to improve and update its image and marketing strategy and suffered an alarming slip in sales while its competitors moved forward.

In the late 1980s, it was widely thought that the era of the branded product was over. Price, rather than brand loyalty and image, seemed to be the method by which consumers were increasingly choosing their purchases. The 1990s, it was believed, would be the decade of ‘value,’ where consumers focused on economic rationale.

Instead, brands dominate today’s society in unprecedented ways. Far from shriveling into nothing, brands have, on the contrary, dramatically increased their power and prestige.

There are very few towns in America that don’t have a Wal-Mart or Starbucks. In the past few decades, these incredibly successful firms have grown spectacularly quickly. In 1986, Starbucks had only a few cafes in Seattle; by 1999, they had over 1,900 stores across the globe.

The fantastic success of such brands largely stems from aggressive business models that allow them to capture huge swathes of the market and ruthlessly eradicate rivals. The business models of major brands almost always depend heavily on economies of scale but differ in their approaches to expansion, depending on their particular market.

Over the last few decades, many multinational companies have followed what is known as the ‘Nike Model’ of manufacture. Basically, in order to save on labor costs, firms have shut down their factories in Western countries and outsourced their manufacture to the less-developed world where labor is much cheaper.

The workers who make the products that were previously produced in Western factories are contractors rather than employees; hence, the multinationals have no responsibility for them.

Traditionally, a large multinational company would directly employ the vast majority of its workforce to manufacture the company’s products. The unionization of the company's workforce enabled a large proportion of its employees to have relatively well-paid, full-time permanent jobs. Working conditions were good, and many employees and employers felt loyalty toward one another.

The policy of outsourcing changed all this in the 1980s. Multinationals realized that they could dramatically cut labor costs by employing overseas contractors to manufacture their goods instead of using the factories at home. As branding became more important than the products themselves, companies preferred to spend their money on advertising and marketing rather than on manufacturers.

In 1994, the film production company Viacom purchased Paramount Pictures and Blockbuster Video. This gave Viacom an enormous advantage because it could profit when its films played in Paramount cinemas and also afterwards when they came out on video.

This is known as synergy, where corporations come together to complete a branded loop comprising a range of interconnected brands. From mergers and takeovers to cross-marketing initiatives such as McDonald’s handing out Disney toys with meals, synergy pushes brands into new media and markets.

Brands can often find themselves the targets of activist campaigns protesting, for example, their use of sweatshops, unecological practices or unethical advertising.

Certain activist groups attach themselves like leeches to a brand and follow their practices across the globe, bringing the brand’s actions to wider public attention.

Brands wield a tremendous amount of cultural power in modern society. They battle for our economic and cultural attention in many areas of society and continuously push themselves into new spheres of our lives.

Due to this constant brainwashing, brand names and their logos have burned themselves onto our consciousness. Certain brands and their images, slogans and logos are known by almost everyone. Yet, for companies, there is also a negative side to this cultural ubiquity.

The key message in this book:

Since the 1980s, the power and influence of brands has grown massively. Brand image and identity, as well as brand promotion through advertising and marketing, has taken over as the driving force behind a company’s power. This policy has given brands unprecedented power, and activists have realised that the best way to improve the global economic system is to target brands directly.