Naomi Klein Precis

In her excerpt from her book No Logo, Naomi Klein traces the function of corporation from product-producer to culture-creator. Branding, Klein argues, facilitated this movement.

Klein discusses how "the making of things remained, at least in principle, the heart of all industrialized economies" in the early to mid-20th century. Marx had discussed earlier that products were drained of their historicity in the Fetishized Commodity, and arguably, the products themselves became indistinguishable from one another because of this. This may explain why criticisms emerged of the corporate structure -- they were "bloated [and] oversized," and this oversized-ness did not necessarily lead to more sales or better products but rather served as a "liability" for the CEO. Thus, corporations shrunk their literal space by moving labor overseas (as a result of trade liberalization and labor-law reform), and expanded into the public-space in the form of advertising. More insidious, as Klein argues, was the corporate expansion into the realm of idea and thought through the process of branding.

Since products were "virtually indistinguishable from one another," the corporation took on the role of creating an artificial historicity that would not be embedded into the product that it was selling, but rather into the structure of the corporation itself. Marlboro Friday struck fear into the hearts of corporations, thinking that branding had hit its peak, since consumers were readily willing to buy "private" products for a cheaper price, "claiming, heretically, that they couldn't tell the difference [between products]." However, the "abstract and unquantifiable brand name" was much more powerful than some corporations had presumed, as long as branding did not stop at mere advertising into the public space. The advertising must also exist within every element of the corporation itself, whether it was the sleek, pseudo-futuristic, pristine white interior of an Apple store (albeit those stores are hella sexy), the friendly, smiling "barista" at your local Starbucks overjoyed by her $6/hour salary, or the cheerful singing cluster of Coldstone Creamery employees, returning their gratitude for your ever-so-generous contribution of a $1 tip. Put another way, corporate structures, in order to be fully branded, must "argue" that an experience is interwoven within the purchase.

Therefore, branding, if it had successfully cultivated a fake culture that, in some cases, literally had nothing to do with its products, could potentially capture, colonize, and practically enslave the hearts and minds of its consumers. In doing so, the corporation carves a void within its consumers that could only be filled by the corporation itself. Who wants the Blue IBM, "looking as clunky and menacing as the now-dead Cold War," (a feeling created after the Orwellian takeoff ad) when you could be "hip" and "new" and Apple-y. Branding based its success, then, on not making the product seem worthy of your money, but rather, to make an individual feel dissatisfied with what he already possesses. Put another way, fraternities only become attractive not by the sticky floors, caked with clumsy spills of Natty Light Beer, semen, and blood, but rather when one feels like his group of friends does not offer the same "camaraderie" and "brotherhood" that can only be attained through the semesterly-membership fee and centuries-worth safeguarding of white privilege and wealth.

The implications in Klein's discussion are fairly dismal. The boundaries of experience have shrunk from the actual world to the confines and architectures formulaically designed by an unnamed, unidentifiable marketing team. In doing so, corporations have potentially dispossessed human beings of their own culture-producing capabilities. In other words, humans, who have heretofore positioned themselves within particular communities colored by their own histories and interactions with their environments, are finding themselves instead within "cultures" that have been manufactured for them, with histories that are absolutely artificial and de-particularized of actual social and historical episodes that explain their current condition. Meaning-making and lifestyle are no longer found in or built by an engagement with the world, but rather through a stagnant, virtual world. Corporations, according to Klein, have transcended their role as manufacturing products; they manufacture life dehistoricized; they are creators; they have souls; thus, they have pushed any "heretical" non-customers towards the dark tumors of lifelessness, boringness, blandness -- they are brandless.