No Logo – Ten Years On

Soon after No Logo was released a decade ago, it had an immediate and resounding impact.  Klein was inundated with calls from corporations seeking to revamp their tired brands and get the upper hand on their detractors; at the same time a whole new generation of activists was suddenly brought into action.  Now, ten years later, Fourth Estate has published an anniversary edition; but what made the book into such an iconic and seminal signpost in the anti-globalisation debate?

At the heart of Klein’s book was the notion that companies were now focussed on creating brands; products were an afterthought.  Brands, Klein argued, used to be a way of giving everyday products a recognisable face; now they had usurped these products, becoming more important than the products themselves.  Companies which are now permanent fixtures and fittings of our daily landscape came into being.  Behind their pre-eminence, however, lurked something distinctly unsettling: an outsourced supply chain which allowed the companies to focus resources on creating their brands rather than on the products themselves.   Klein dedicates a large chunk of the book to laying bare networks of exploitation on which some of the world’s most ubiquitous and successful products are based.

Klein backs this overarching thesis up with an astonishingly detailed set of research; what stands it aside from other polemics of the time is the painstaking detail of Klein’s case studies – the book took four years of careful field research to write.

That said, all of this is presented in an informal way and with such a paucity of language that the reader never feels bogged down in the figures which line the book.  It begins, in fact, with Klein looking at her own building – owned by the town coat maker – who Klein then links to the book’s thesis as a whole.  Klein approaches her subjects throughout with humanity and objectivity, combining facts with personal stories – whether looking at Nike’s growing influence in American high schools or sweatshop workers in the Philippines – preferring to use the force of facts rather than emotion to press her case.

Klein may now set her sights on different targets: her latest book, Shock Doctrine, won the inaugural Warwick Prize for writing in 2009 for its excoriating analysis of the implementation of the ideas of the Chicago school.  However, No Logo is as insightful and relevant today as ever before and will undoubtedly be revisited by countless readers.

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