IMAGINE a world without brands. It existed once, and still exists, more or less, in the world’s poorest places. No raucous advertising, no ugly billboards, no McDonald’s. Yet, given a chance and a bit of money, people flee this Eden. They seek out Budweiser instead of their local tipple, ditch nameless shirts for Gap, prefer Marlboros to home-grown smokes. What should one conclude? That people are pawns in the hands of giant companies with huge advertising budgets and global reach? Or that brands bring something that people think is better than what they had before?
The pawn theory is argued, forcefully if not always coherently, by Naomi Klein, author of No Logo , a book that has become a bible of the anti-globalisation movement. Her thesis is that brands have come to represent a fascist state where we all salute the logo and have little opportunity for criticism because our newspapers, television stations, Internet servers, streets and retail spaces are all controlled by multinational corporate interests. The ubiquity and power of brand advertising curtails choice, she claims; produced cheaply in thirdworld sweatshops, branded goods displace local alternatives and force a grey cultural homogeneity on the world. Brands have thus become stalking horses for international capitalism. Outside the United States, they are now symbols of America’s corporate power, since most of the world’s bestknown brands are American. Around them accrete all the worries about environmental damage, human-rights abuses and sweated labour that anti-globalists like to put on their placards. No wonder brands seem bad.
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The Economist 8 Setemebro 2001
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