Subject: [permaculture] Naomi Klein on how corporate branding has taken over America
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:00:59 -0500
Naomi Klein on how corporate branding has taken over America
Ten years after the publication of No Logo, Naomi Klein switches her
attention from the mall to Barack Obama and discovers that corporate
culture has taken over the US government
In May 2009, Absolut Vodka launched a limited edition line called
"Absolut No Label". The company's global public relations manager,
Kristina Hagbard, explained that "For the first time we dare to face the
world completely naked. We launch a bottle with no label and no logo, to
manifest the idea that no matter what's on the outside, it's the inside
that really matters."
A few months later, Starbucks opened its first unbranded coffee shop in
Seattle, called 15th Avenue E Coffee and Tea. This "stealth Starbucks"
(as the anomalous outlet immediately became known) was decorated with
"one-of-a-kind" fixtures and customers were invited to bring in their
own music for the stereo system as well as their own pet social causes
all to help develop what the company called "a community personality."
Customers had to look hard to find the small print on the menus:
"inspired by Starbucks". Tim Pfeiffer, a Starbucks senior
vice-president, explained that unlike the ordinary Starbucks outlet that
used to occupy the same piece of retail space, "This one is definitely a
little neighbourhood coffee shop." After spending two decades blasting
its logo on to 16,000 stores worldwide, Starbucks was now trying to
escape its own brand.
Clearly the techniques of branding have both thrived and adapted since I
published No Logo. But in the past 10 years I have written very little
about developments like these. I realised why while reading William
Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. The book's protagonist, Cayce
Pollard, is allergic to brands, particularly Tommy Hilfiger and the
Michelin man. So strong is this "morbid and sometimes violent reactivity
to the semiotics of the marketplace" that she has the buttons on her
Levi's jeans ground smooth so that there are no corporate markings. When
I read those words, I immediately realised that I had a similar
affliction. As a child and teenager I was almost obsessively drawn to
brands. But writing No Logo required four years of total immersion in ad
culture four years of watching and rewatching Super Bowl ads, scouring
Advertising Age for the latest innovations in corporate synergy, reading
soul-destroying business books on how to get in touch with your personal
brand values, making excursions to Niketowns, to monster malls, to
branded towns.
Some of it was fun. But by the end, it was as if I had passed some kind
of threshold and, like Cayce, I developed something close to a brand
allergy. Brands lost most of their charm for me, which was handy because
once No Logo was a bestseller, even drinking a Diet Coke in public could
land me in the gossip column of my hometown newspaper.
The aversion extended even to the brand that I had accidentally created:
No Logo. From studying Nike and Starbucks, I was well acquainted with
the basic tenet of brand management: find your message, trademark and
protect it and repeat yourself ad nauseam through as many synergised
platforms as possible. I set out to break these rules whenever the
opportunity arose. The offers for No Logo spin-off projects (feature
film, TV series, clothing line . . .) were rejected. So were the ones
from the megabrands and cutting-edge advertising agencies that wanted me
to give them seminars on why they were so hated (there was a career to
be made, I was learning, in being a kind of anti-corporate dominatrix,
making overpaid executives feel good by telling them what bad, bad
brands they were). And against all sensible advice, I stuck by the
decision not to trademark the title (that means no royalties from a line
of Italian No Logo food products, though they did send me some lovely
olive oil).
Most important to my marketing detox program, I changed the subject.
Less than a year after No Logo came out I put a personal ban on all talk
of corporate branding. In interviews and public appearances I would
steer discussion away from the latest innovation in viral marketing and
Prada's new superstore and towards the growing resistance movement
against corporate rule, the one that had captured world attention with
the militant protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle.
"But aren't you your own brand?" clever interviewers would ask me
endlessly. "Probably," I would respond. "But I try to be a really crap one."
Changing the subject from branding to politics was no great sacrifice
because politics was what brought me to marketing in the first place.
The first articles I published as a journalist were about the limited
job options available to me and my peers the rise of short-term
contracts and McJobs, as well as the ubiquitous use of sweatshop labour
to produce the branded gear sold to us. As a token "youth columnist", I
also covered how an increasingly voracious marketing culture was
encroaching on previously protected non-corporate spaces schools,
museums, parks while ideas that my friends and I had considered
radical were absorbed almost instantly into the latest marketing
campaigns for Nike, Benetton and Apple.
I decided to write No Logo when I realised these seemingly disparate
trends were connected by a single idea that corporations should
produce brands, not products. This was the era when corporate epiphanies
were striking CEOs like lightning bolts from the heavens: Nike isn't a
running shoe company, it is about the idea of transcendence through
sports, Starbucks isn't a coffee shop chain, it's about the idea of
community. Down on earth these epiphanies meant that many companies that
had manufactured their products in their own factories, and had
maintained large, stable workforces, embraced the now ubiquitous Nike
model: close your factories, produce your products through an intricate
web of contractors and subcontractors and pour your resources into the
design and marketing required to project your big idea. Or they went for
the Microsoft model: maintain a tight control centre of
shareholder/employees who perform the company's "core competency" and
outsource everything else to temps, from running the mailroom to writing
code. Some called these restructured companies "hollow corporations"
because their goal seemed to be to transcend the corporeal world of
things so they could be an utterly unencumbered brand. As corporate guru
Tom Peters put it: "You're a damn fool if you own it!"
For me, the appeal of X-raying brands such as Nike or Starbucks was that
pretty soon you were talking about everything except marketing from
how products are made in the deregulated global supply chain to
industrial agriculture and commodity prices. Next thing you knew you
were also talking about the nexus of politics and money that locked in
these wild-west rules through free-trade deals and at the WTO, and made
following them the precondition of receiving much-needed loans from the
International Monetary Fund. In short, you were talking about how the
world works.
By the time No Logo came out, the movement was already at the gates of
the powerful institutions that were spreading corporatism around the
world. Tens and then hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were making
their case outside trade summits and G8 meetings from Seattle to New
Delhi, in several cases stopping new agreements in their tracks. What
the corporate media insisted on calling the "anti-globalisation
movement" was nothing of the sort. At the reformist end it was
anti-corporate; at the radical end it was anti-capitalist. But what made
it unique was its insistent internationalism. All of these developments
meant that when I was on a book tour, there were many more interesting
things to talk about than logos such as where this movement came from,
what it wanted and whether there were viable alternatives to the
ruthless strain of corporatism that went under the innocuous pseudonym
of "globalisation".
?
In recent years, however, I have found myself doing something I swore I
had finished with: rereading the branding gurus quoted in the book. This
time, however, it wasn't to try to understand what was happening at the
mall but rather at the White House first under the presidency of
George W Bush and now under Barack Obama, the first US president who is
also a superbrand.
There are many acts of destruction for which the Bush years are rightly
reviled the illegal invasions, the defiant defences of torture, the
tanking of the global economy. But the administration's most lasting
legacy may well be the way it systematically did to the US government
what branding-mad CEOs did to their companies a decade earlier: it
hollowed it out, handing over to the private sector many of the most
essential functions of government, from protecting borders to responding
to disasters to collecting intelligence. This hollowing out was not a
side project of the Bush years, it was a central mission, reaching into
every field of governance. And though the Bush clan was often ridiculed
for its incompetence, the process of auctioning off the state, leaving
behind only a shell or a brand was approached with tremendous focus
and precision.
One company that took over many services was Lockheed Martin, the
world's largest defence contractor. "Lockheed Martin doesn't run the
United Slates," observed a 2004 New York Times exposé. "But it does help
run a breathtakingly big part of it . . . It sorts your mail and totals
your taxes. It cuts Social Security cheques and counts the United States
census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that
happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft."
No one approached the task of auctioning off the state with more zeal
than Bush's much-maligned defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Having
spent 20-odd years in the private sector, Rumsfeld was steeped in the
corporate culture of branding and outsourcing. His department's brand
identity was clear: global dominance. The core competency was combat.
For everything else, he said (sounding very much like Bill Gates), "We
should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities
efficiently and effectively."
The laboratory for this radical vision was Iraq under US occupation.
From the start Rumsfeld planned the troop deployment like a Wal-Mart
vice-president looking to shave a few more hours from the payroll. The
generals wanted 500,000 troops, he would give them 200,000, with
contractors and reservists filling the gaps as needed a just-in-time
invasion. In practice, this strategy meant that as Iraq spiralled out of
US control, an ever-more elaborate privatised war industry took shape to
prop up the bare-bones army. Blackwater, whose original contract was to
provide bodyguards for US envoy Paul Bremer, soon took on other
functions, including engaging in combat in a battle with the Mahdi army
in 2004. The sprawling Green Zone, meanwhile, was run as a corporate
city-state, with everything from food to entertainment to pest control
handled by Halliburton. Just as companies such as Nike and Microsoft had
pioneered the hollow corporation, this was, in many ways, a hollow war.
And when one of the contractors screwed up Blackwater operatives
opening fire in Baghdad's Nisour Square in 2007, for instance, leaving
17 people dead, or Halliburton allegedly supplying contaminated water to
soldiers the Bush administration was free to deny responsibility.
Blackwater, which had prided itself on being the Disney of mercenary
companies, complete with a line of branded clothing and Blackwater teddy
bears, responded to the scandals by what else? rebranding. Its new
name is Xe Services.
?
The Bush administration's determination to mimic the hollow corporations
it admired extended to its handling of the anger its actions inspired
around the world. Rather than actually changing or even adjusting its
policies, it launched a series of ill-fated campaigns to "rebrand
America" for an increasingly hostile world. Watching these cringeful
attempts, I was convinced that Price Floyd, former director of media
relations at the State Department, had it right. After resigning in
frustration, he said that the United States was facing mounting anger
not because of the failure of its messaging but because of the failure
of its policies. "I'd be in meetings with other public-affairs officials
at State and the White House," Floyd told Slate magazine. "They'd say:
'We need to get our people out there on more media.' I'd say: 'It's not
so much the packaging, it's the substance that's giving us trouble.'" A
powerful, imperialist country is not like a hamburger or a running shoe.
America didn't have a branding problem; it had a product problem.
I used to think that, but I may have been wrong. When Obama was sworn in
as president, the American brand could scarcely have been more
battered Bush was to his country what New Coke was to Coca-Cola, what
cyanide in the bottles had been to Tylenol. Yet Obama, in what was
perhaps the most successful rebranding campaign of all time, managed to
turn things around. Kevin Roberts, global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, set
out to depict visually what the new president represented. In a
full-page graphic commissioned by the stylish Paper Magazine, he showed
the Statue of Liberty with her legs spread, giving birth to Barack
Obama. America, reborn.
So, it seemed that the United States government could solve its
reputation problems with branding it's just that it needed a branding
campaign and product spokesperson sufficiently hip, young and exciting
to compete in today's tough market. The nation found that in Obama, a
man who clearly has a natural feel for branding and who has surrounded
himself with a team of top-flight marketers. His social networking guru,
for instance, is Chris Hughes, one of the young founders of Facebook.
His social secretary is Desirée Rogers, a glamorous Harvard MBA and
former marketing executive. And David Axelrod, Obama's top adviser, was
formerly a partner in ASK Public Strategies, a PR firm which, according
to Business Week, "has quarterbacked campaigns" for everyone from
Cablevision to AT&T. Together, the team has marshalled every tool in
the modem marketing arsenal to create and sustain the Obama brand: the
perfectly calibrated logo (sunrise over stars and stripes); expert viral
marketing (Obama ringtones); product placement (Obama ads in sports
video games); a 30-minute infomercial (which could have been cheesy but
was universally heralded as "authentic"); and the choice of strategic
brand alliances (Oprah for maximum reach, the Kennedy family for
gravitas, and no end of hip-hop stars for street cred).
The first time I saw the "Yes We Can" video, the one produced by Black
Eyed Peas front man will.i.am, featuring celebrities speaking and
singing over a Martin Luther Kingesque Obama speech, I thought: finally,
a politician with ads as cool as Nike. The ad industry agreed. A few
weeks before he won the presidential elections, Obama beat Nike, Apple,
Coors and Zappos to win the Association of National Advertisers' top
annual award Marketer of the Year. It was certainly a shift. In the
1990s, brands upstaged politics completely. Now corporate brands were
rushing to piggyback on Obama's caché (Pepsi's "Choose Change" campaign,
Ikea's "Embrace Change '09" and Southwest Airlines' offer of "Yes You
Can" tickets).
Indeed everything Obama and his family touches turns to branding gold. J
Crew saw its stock price increase 200% in the first six months of
Obama's presidency, thanks in part to Michelle's well known fondness for
the brand. Obama's much-discussed attachment to his BlackBerry has been
similarly good news for Research In Motion. The surest way to sell
magazines and newspapers in these difficult times is to have an Obama on
the cover, and you only need to call three ounces of vodka and some
fruit juice an Obamapolitan or a Barackatini and you can get $15 for it,
easy. In February 2009, Portfolio magazine put the size of "the Obama
economy" the tourism he generates and the swag he inspires - at
$2.5bn. Not at all bad in an economic crisis. Rogers got into trouble
with some of her colleagues when she spoke too frankly with The Wall
Street Journal. "We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand," she
said. "Our possibilities are endless."
The exploration of those possibilities did not end, or even slow, with
the election victory. Bush had used his ranch in Crawford, Texas, as a
backdrop to perform his best impersonation of the Marlboro man, forever
clearing brush, having cookouts and wearing cowboy boots. Obama has gone
much further, turning the White House into a kind of never-ending
reality show starring the lovable Obama clan. This too can be traced to
the mid-90s branding craze, when marketers grew tired of the limitations
of traditional advertising and began creating three-dimensional
"experiences" branded temples where shoppers could crawl inside the
personality of their favourite brands. The problem is not that Obama is
using the same tricks and tools as the superbrands; anyone wanting to
move the culture these days pretty much has to do that. The problem is
that, as with so many other lifestyle brands before him, his actions do
not come close to living up to the hopes he has raised.
Though it's too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do
know this: he favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural
change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing
the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison while going ahead with an
expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison
in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who
authorised torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the
Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new
immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy, while
championing the fantasy of "clean coal" and refusing to tax emissions,
the only sure way to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels.
Most importantly, he will claim to be ending the war in Iraq, and will
retire the ugly "war on terror" phrase even as the conflicts guided by
that fatal logic escalate in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This preference for symbols over substance, and this unwillingness to
stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, is where Obama decisively
parts ways with the transformative political movements from which he has
borrowed so much (the pop-art posters from Che, his cadence from King,
his "Yes We Can!" slogan from the migrant farmworkers si se puede).
These movements made unequivocal demands of existing power structures:
for land distribution, higher wages, ambitious social programmes.
Because of those high-cost demands, these movements had not only
committed followers but serious enemies. Obama, in sharp contrast not
just to social movements but to transformative presidents such as FDR,
follows the logic of marketing: create an appealing canvas on which all
are invited to project their deepest desires but stay vague enough not
to lose anyone but the committed wing nuts (which, granted, constitute a
not inconsequential demographic in the United States). Advertising Age
had it right when it gushed that the Obama brand is "big enough to be
anything to anyone yet had an intimate enough feel to inspire advocacy".
And then their highest compliment: "Mr Obama somehow managed to be both
Coke and Honest Tea, both the megabrand with the global awareness and
distribution network and the dark-horse, upstart niche player."
Another way of putting it is that Obama played the anti-war, anti-Wall
Street party crasher to his grassroots base, which imagined itself
leading an insurgency against the two-party monopoly through dogged
organisation and donations gathered from lemonade stands and loose
change found in the crevices of the couch. Meanwhile, he took more money
from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate, swallowed the
Democratic party establishment in one gulp after defeating Hillary
Clinton, then pursued "bipartisanship" with crazed Republicans once in
the White House.
?
Does Obama's failure to live up to his lofty brand cost him? It didn't
at first. An international study by Pew's Global Attitudes Project,
conducted five months after he took office, asked people whether they
were confident Obama would "do the right thing in world affairs". Even
though there was already plenty of evidence that Obama was continuing
many of Bush's core international policies (albeit with a far less
arrogant style), the vast majority said they approved of Obama in
Jordan and Egypt, a fourfold increase from the Bush era. In Europe the
change in attitude could give you whiplash: Obama had the confidence of
91% of French respondents and 86% of Britons - compared with 13% and 16%
respectively under Bush. The poll was proof that "Obama's presidency
essentially erased the battering the US's image took during eight years
of the Bush administration," according to USA Today. Axelrod put it like
this: "What has happened is that anti-Americanism isn't cool anymore."
That was certainly true, and had very real consequences. Obama's
election and the world's corresponding love affair with his rebranded
America came at a crucial time. In the two months before the election,
the financial crisis rocking world markets was being rightly blamed not
just on the contagion of Wall Street's bad bets but on the entire
economic model of deregulation and privatisation that had been preached
from US-dominated institutions such as the IMF and the WTO. If the
United States were led by someone who didn't happen to be a global
superstar, US prestige would have continued to plummet and the rage at
the economic model at the heart of the global meltdown would likely have
turned into sustained demands for new rules to rein in (and seriously
tax) speculative finance.
Those rules were supposed to have been on the agenda when G20 leaders
met at the height of the economic crisis in London in April 2009.
Instead, the press focused on excited sightings of the fashionable Obama
couple, while world leaders agreed to revive the ailing IMF a chief
culprit in this mess with up to a trillion dollars in new financing.
In short, Obama didn't just rebrand America, he resuscitated the
neoliberal economic project when it was at death's door. No one but
Obama, wrongly perceived as a new FDR, could have pulled it off.
Yet rereading No Logo after 10 years provides many reminders that
success in branding can be fleeting, and that nothing is more fleeting
than the quality of being cool. Many of the superbrands and branded
celebrities that looked untouchable not so long ago have either faded or
are in deep crisis today. The Obama brand could well suffer a similar
fate. Of course many people supported Obama for straightforward
strategic reasons: they rightly wanted the Republicans out and he was
the best candidate. But what will happen when the throngs of Obama
faithful realise that they gave their hearts not to a movement that
shared their deepest values but to a devoutly corporatist political
party, one that puts the profits of drug companies before the need for
affordable health care, and Wall Street's addiction to financial bubbles
before the needs of millions of people whose homes and jobs could have
been saved with a better bailout?
The risk and it is real is that the response will be waves of bitter
cynicism, particularly among the young people for whom the Obama
campaign was their first taste of politics. Most won't switch parties,
they'll just do what young people used to do during elections: stay
home, tune out. Another, more hopeful possibility is that Obamamania
will end up being what the US president's advisers like to call "a
teachable moment". Obama is a gifted politician with a deep intelligence
and a greater inclination towards social justice than any leader of his
party in recent memory. If he cannot change the system in order to keep
his election promises, it's because the system itself is utterly broken.
It was a conversation about changing the system that many of us were
having in the brief period between the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in
November 1999 and the beginning of the so-called war on terror. For the
movement the media insisted on calling "anti-globalisation," it mattered
little which political party happened to be in power in our respective
countries. We were focused squarely on the rules of the game, and how
they had been distorted to serve the narrow interests of corporations at
every level of governance from international free-trade agreements to
local water privatisation deals.
Looking back, what I liked most was the unapologetic wonkery of it all.
In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins
and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people, that were
exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of
global finance and trade. It was as if people understood, all at once,
that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of
democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced
that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just
symbols.
In some parts of the world, particularly Latin America, that wave of
resistance spread and strengthened. In some countries, social movements
grew strong enough to join with political parties, winning national
elections and beginning to forge a new regional fair-trade regime. But
elsewhere, September 11 pretty much blasted the movement out of
existence. What we knew about the sophistication of global corporatism
that all the world's injustice could not be blamed on one rightwing
political party, or on one nation, no matter how powerful seemed to
disappear.
If there was ever a time to remember the lessons we learned at the turn
of the millennium, it is now. One benefit of the international failure
to regulate the financial sector, even after its catastrophic collapse,
is that the economic model that dominates around the world has revealed
itself not as "free market" but "crony capitalist" politicians handing
over public wealth to private players in exchange for political support.
What used to be politely hidden is all out in the open now.
Correspondingly, public rage at corporate greed is at its highest point
not just in my lifetime but in my parents' lifetime as well. Many of the
points supposedly marginal activists were making in the streets 10 years
ago are now the accepted wisdom of cable news talk shows and mainstream
op-ed pages.
And yet missing from this populist moment is what was beginning to
emerge a decade ago: a movement that did not just respond to individual
outrages but had a set of proactive demands for a more just and
sustainable economic model. In the United States and many parts of
Europe, it is far-right parties and even neofascism that are giving the
loudest voice to anti-corporatist rage.
Personally, none of this makes me feel betrayed by Barack Obama. Rather
I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like
Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their
transcendental branding campaigns. All of their high-priced market
research had found a longing in people for something more than
shopping for social change, for public space, for greater equality and
diversity. Of course the brands tried to exploit that longing to sell
lattes and laptops. Yet it seemed to me that we on the left owed the
marketers a debt of gratitude for all this: our ideas weren't as passé
as we had been told. And since the brands couldn't fulfill the deep
desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.
Perhaps Obama should be viewed in much the same way. Once again, the
market research has been done for us. What the election and the global
embrace of Obama's brand proved decisively is that there is a tremendous
appetite for progressive change that many, many people do not want
markets opened at gunpoint, are repelled by torture, believe
passionately in civil liberties, want corporations out of politics, see
global warming as the fight of our time, and very much want to be part
of a political project larger than themselves.
Those kinds of transformative goals are only ever achieved when
independent social movements build the numbers and the organisational
power to make muscular demands of their elites. Obama won office by
capitalising on our profound nostalgia for those kinds of social
movements. But it was only an echo, a memory. The task ahead is to build
movements that are to borrow an old Coke slogan the real thing. As
Studs Terkel, the great oral historian, used to say: "Hope has never
trickled down. It has always sprung up."
Extracted from No Logo (10th Anniversary Edition) by Naomi Klein, to
be published by Fourth Estate on 21 January at GBP 9.99
Posted by:
Brent McMillan, Steward of Woodhaven
Avilla, IN, USA
[permaculture] Naomi Klein on how corporate branding has taken over America,
Brent McMillan, 01/21/2010