No Logo

by Naomi Klein

  The question, of course, is not Why, but Why on earth not? Just as they had embraced the “brands, not products” equation, the smart businesses quickly realized that short-term discomfort —whether it came from a require ment to hire more women or to more carefully vet the language in an ad campaign —was a small price to pay for the tremendous market share that diversity promised. So while it may be true that real gains have emerged from this process, it is also true that Dennis Rodman wears dresses and Disney World celebrates Gay Day less because of political progress than financial expediency. The market has seized upon multiculturalism and gender-bending in the same ways that it has seized upon youth culture in general —not just as a market niche but as a source of new carnival-esque imagery. As Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson note, “White-bread culture will simply no longer do.”10 The $200 billion culture industry —now America’s biggest export —needs an ever-changing, uninterrupted supply of street styles, edgy music videos and rainbows of colors. And the radical critics of the media clamoring to be “represented” in the early nineties virtually handed over their colorful identities to the brandmasters to be shrink-wrapped.

  The need for greater diversity —the rallying cry of my university years — is now not only accepted by the culture industries, it is the mantra of global capital. And identity politics, as they were practiced in the nineties, weren’t a threat, they were a gold mine. “This revolution,” writes cultural critic Richard Goldstein in The Village Voice, “turned out to be the savior of late capitalism.”11 And just in time, too.

  Market Masala: Diversity and the Global Sales Pitch

  About the same time that my friends and I were battling for better cultural representation, the advertising agencies, broadcasters and global brands were preoccupied with some significant problems of their own. Thanks to freer trade and other forms of accelerated deregulation, the global marketplace was finally becoming a reality, but new, urgent questions were being asked: What is the best way to sell identical products across multiple borders? What voice should advertisers use to address the whole world at once? How can one company accommodate cultural differences while still remaining internally coherent?

  For certain corporations, until recently, the answer was simple: force the world to speak your language and absorb your culture. In 1983, when global reach was still a fantasy for all but a handful of corporations, Harvard business professor Theodore Levitt published the essay “The Globalization of Markets,” in which he argued that any corporation that was willing to bow to some local habit or taste was an unmitigated failure. “The world’s needs and desires have been irrevocably homogenized,” he wrote in what instantly became the manifesto of global marketing. Levitt made a stark distinction between weak multinational corporations, which change depending on which country they are operating in, and swaggering global corporations, which are, by their very definition, always the same, wherever they roam. “The multinational corporation operates in a number of countries, and adjusts its products and practices to each —at high relative costs. The global corporation operates with resolute constancy —at low relative cost — as if the entire world (or major regions of it) were a single entity; it sells the same things in the same way everywhere…. Ancient differences in national tastes or modes of doing business disappear.”12

  Levitt’s “global” corporations were, of course, American corporations and the “homogenized” image they promoted were the images of America: blond, blue-eyed kids eating Kellogg’s cereal on Japanese TV; the Marlboro Man bringing U.S. cattle country to African villages; and Coke and McDonald’s selling the entire world on the taste of the U.S.A. As globalization ceased to be a somewhat kooky dream and became a reality, these cowboy-marketing antics began to step on a few toes. The twentieth century’s familiar bogeyman —“American cultural imperialism” —has, in more recent years, incited cries of “cultural Chernobyl” in France, prompted the creation of a “slow-food movement” in Italy and led to the burning of chickens outside the first KFC outlet in India.

  Americans in particular have never been known for their cultural sensitivity and so, not surprisingly, the road to Levitt’s global marketing is paved with cultural faux pas. The most serious of these took place after the collapse of European communism, when media moguls fell over one another to take the credit for freedom and democracy the world over —a claim they would pay for later on. “We put MTV into East Germany, and the next day the Berlin Wall fell,” Viacom International chairman Sumner Redstone said.13 Ted Turner claimed the credit for CNN and the Goodwill Games. “I said, ‘Let’s try and undo this. Let’s get our young people together, and let’s get this cycle together and let’s try to get some world peace going and let’s end the Cold War.’ And, by God, we did it.”14 Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, told the world that “satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television.”15

  This post—Cold War bravado didn’t go over too well in countries like China, where standing up to so-called Western values remains a sacrosanct political claim. Consequently, several Western media moguls —now hell-bent on penetrating all of Asia with their satellites —have gone to great lengths to distance themselves from their earlier freedom-fighter rhetoric and now actively collaborate with dictatorships to restrict the flow of information, a situation that I’ll get to in more detail in Chapter 8.

  It was in this minefield that “diversity” marketing appeared, presenting itself as a cure-all for the pitfalls of global expansion. Rather than creating different advertising campaigns for different markets, campaigns could sell diversity itself, to all markets at once. The formula maintained the one-size-fits-all cost benefits of old-style cowboy cultural imperialism, but ran far fewer risks of offending local sensibilities. Instead of urging the world to taste America, it calls out, like the Skittles slogan, to “Taste the Rainbow.” This candy-coated multiculturalism has stepped in as a kinder, gentler packaging for the homogenizing effect of what Indian physicist Vandana Shiva calls “the monoculture” —it is, in effect, mono-multiculturalism.

  Today the buzzword in global marketing isn’t selling America to the world, but bringing a kind of market masala to everyone in the world. In the late nineties, the pitch is less Marlboro Man, more Ricky Martin: a bilingual mix of North and South, some Latin, some R&B, all couched in global party lyrics. This ethnic-food-court approach creates a One World placelessness, a global mall in which corporations are able to sell a single product in numerous countries without triggering the old cries of “Coca-Colonization.”

  As culture becomes increasingly homogenized globally, the task of marketing is to stave off the nightmare moment when branded products cease to look like lifestyles or grand ideas and suddenly appear as the ubiquitous goods they really are. In its liquid ethnicity, marketing masala has been introduced as the antidote to this horror of cultural homogeneity. By embodying corporate identities that are radically individualistic and perpetually new, the brands attempt to inoculate themselves against accusations that they are in fact selling sameness.

  The Global Teen

  Of course not everyone is equally amenable to the idea of treating culture and nationality as fashion accessories to be slipped on and off. Those who have fought wars and survived revolutions tend to be more protective of their national traditions. The desolately poor, who constitute one-quarter of the world’s population,16 also have a little trouble getting into the global groove, especially since cable TV and most brand-name products are still just a rumor in those parts of the developing world where a total of 1.3 billion people live on US$1 a day or less.17 No, it’s the young people living in developed and semi-developed countries who are the great global hope. More than anything or anyone else, logo-decorated middle-class teenagers, intent on pouring themselves into a media-fabricated mold, have become globalization’s most powerful symbols.

  This has happened for several reasons. First of all, just as
in the U.S. market, there are a lot of them. The world is crawling with teenagers, especially in southern countries, where the UN estimates that 507 million adults will die before they turn forty.18 Two-thirds of Asia’s population is under thirty and, thanks to years of bloody warfare, about 50 percent of the population in Vietnam was born after 1975. All in all, the so-called global teen demographic is estimated at one billion, and these teenagers consume a disproportionate share of their families’ incomes. In China, for instance, conspicuous consumption for all members of the household remains largely unrealistic. But, argue the market researchers, the Chinese make enormous sacrifices for the young —particularly for young boys —a cultural value that spells great news for cell-phone and sneaker companies. Laurie Klein of Just Kid Inc., a U.S. firm that conducted a consumer study on Chinese teens, found that while Mom, Dad and both grandparents may do without electricity, their only son (thanks to the country’s one-child policy) frequently enjoys what is widely known as “little emperor syndrome,” or what she calls the “4-2-1” phenomenon: four elders and two parents scrimp and save so the one child can be an MTV clone. “When you have the parents and four grandparents spending on one child, it’s a no-brainer to know that this is the right market,” says one venture capitalist in China.19 Furthermore, since kids are more culturally absorbent than their parents, they often become their families’ dedicated shoppers, even for big household items. Taken together, what this research shows is that while adults may still harbor traditional customs and ways, global teens shed those pesky national hang-ups like last year’s fashions. “They prefer Coke to tea, Nikes to sandals, Chicken McNuggets to rice, credit cards to cash,” Joseph Quinlan, senior economist at Dean Witter Reynolds Inc. told The Wall Street Journal.20 The message is clear: get the kids and you’ve got the whole family and the future market.

  Diversity. Whatever.

  —Slogan for a 1998–99 ad campaign for Eaton’s department store, Canada

  Inflated by rhetoric like this, the image of the global teen floats over the planet like a euphoric corporate hallucination. These kids, we are repeatedly told, live not in a geographic place but in a global consumer loop: hot-linked from their cellular telephones to Internet newsgroups; bonded together by Sony Play stations, MTV videos and NBA games. The most extensive and widely cited study of the global teen demographic was conducted in 1996 by the New York—based ad agency DMB&B’s BrainWaves division. The “New World Teen Study” surveyed 27,600 middle-class fifteen-to eighteen-year-olds in forty-five countries and came up with some resoundingly good news for the agency’s clients, a list that includes Coca-Cola, Burger King and Philips. “Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi’s and Nikes, grab their caps, backpacks, and Sony personal CD players, and head for school.”21 Elissa Moses, senior vice president at the advertising agency, called the arrival of the global teen demographic “one of the greatest marketing opportunities of all time.”22

  But before the brands are able to sell the same products in the same way all around the world, the teens themselves must identify with their new demographic. For this reason, what most global ad campaigns are still selling most aggressively is the idea of the global teen market —a kaleidoscope of multi-ethnic faces blending into one another: Rasta braids, pink hair, henna hand painting, piercing and tattoos, a few national flags, flashes of foreign street signs, Cantonese and Arabic lettering and a sprinkling of English words, all over the layered samplings of electronic music. Nationality, language, ethnicity, religion and politics are all reduced to their most colorful, exotic accessories, converging to assure us, as Diesel president Renzo Rosso does, there is “never an ‘us and them,’ but simply one giant ‘we.’”23

  To achieve this state of oneness, global teens must sometimes be pitted against traditional elders who don’t appreciate their radical taste in denim. For instance, a TV ad for Diesel jeans shows two Korean teenagers turning into birds after they commit double suicide, finding freedom only in the total surrender to the brand. In these ads, the ultimate product — more than the soft drinks, ice creams, sneakers or jeans — is the global teen, who must exist as a demographic in the minds of young consumers worldwide or the entire exercise of global marketing collapses. For this reason, global youth marketing is a mind-numbingly repetitive affair, drunk on the idea of what it is attempting to engineer: a third notion of nationality — not American, not local, but one that would unite the two, through shopping.

  Standing triumphant at the center of the global teen phenomenon is MTV, which, in 1998, was in 273.5 million households worldwide — only 70 million of which were in the U.S. By 1999, MTV’s eight global divisions broadcast in 83 countries and territories, fewer than CNN’s 212-country reach, but impressive nonetheless. Furthermore, the New World Teen Study found that the single most significant factor contributing to the shared tastes of the middle-class teens it surveyed was TV —in particular, MTV, which 85 percent of them watched every day. Elissa Moses called the station “an all-news bulletin for creating brand-images”24 and a “public-address system to a generation.”25 This sort of programming reach has been unprecedented since the 1950s when families gathered around the TV set to watch the Ed Sullivan show. Global teens watch so much MTV per day that the only equivalent shared cultural experience among adults occurs during an outbreak of war when all eyes are focused on the same CNN images.

  And the more viewers there are to absorb MTV’s vision of a tribe of culture swapping, global teen nomads, the more homogeneous a market its advertisers have in which to sell their products. According to Chip Walker, director of the New World Teen Study, “Teens who watch MTV music videos are much more likely than other teens to wear the teen ‘uniform’ of jeans, running shoes, and denim jacket … They are also much more likely to own electronics and consume ‘teen’ items such as candy, sodas, cookies and fast food. They are much more likely to use a wide range of personal-care products too.”26 In other words MTV International has become the most compelling global catalog for the modern branded life.

  In-Fighting While the Global House Burned Down

  The global economy’s embrace of Representation Nation suggests that my generation’s campus identity politics boiled down, in the end, to a set of modest political goals that were frequently (and deceptively) cloaked in immodest rhetoric and tactics. This isn’t a P.C. mea culpa —I’m proud of the small victories we won for better lighting on campus, more women faculty members and a less Eurocentric curriculum (to dig up a much-maligned phrase from my P.C. days). What I question is the battles we North American culture warriors never quite got around to. Poverty wasn’t an issue that came up much back then; sure, every once in a while in our crusades against the trio of ‘isms, somebody would bring up “classism,” and, being out-P.C.-ed, we would dutifully add “classism” to the hit list in question. But our criticism was focused on the representation of women and minorities within the structures of power, not on the economics behind those power structures. “Discrimination against poverty” (our understanding of injustice was generally construed as discrimination against something) couldn’t be solved by changing perceptions or language or even, strictly speaking, individual behavior. The basic demands of identity politics assumed an atmosphere of plenty. In the seventies and eighties, that plenty had existed and women and non-whites were able to battle over how the collective pie would be divided: would white men learn to share, or would they keep hogging it? In the representational politics of the New Economy nineties, however, women as well as men, and whites as well as people of color, were now fighting their battles over a single, shrinking piece of pie —and consistently failing to ask what was happening to the rest of it. For us, as students, to address the problems at the roots of “classism” we would have had to face up to core issues of wealth distribution —and, unlike sexism, racism or homophobia, that was not what we used to call “an
awareness problem.”

  So class fell off the agenda, along with all serious economic —let alone corporate —analysis. Certainly there were those in the ID ranks with revolutionary goals. Like the sixties counterculture radicals who thought they were shaking the foundations of Western civilization by dropping acid, there were a handful of professors and students of identity politics who believed that “great blows are being struck against capitalism in the realms of theory,” as critic Gayatri Spivak put it.27 And Dinesh D’Souza and his ilk couldn’t resist calling the P.C.ers “neo-Marxists” — but in fact, nothing could have been further from the truth. The prospect of having to change a few pronouns and getting a handful of women and minorities on the board and on television posed no real threat to the guiding profit-making principles of Wall Street. “The real guilt of P.C….,” wrote SUNY professor of literature Tim Brennan in 1991, “is not its supposed intolerance or rigidity, but that it is not political enough —that it is impersonating political struggle.”28

  That failure has turned out to be immeasurably problematic because the economic trends that have so accelerated in the past decade have all been about massive redistribution and stratification of world resources: of jobs, goods and money. Everyone except those in the very highest tier of the corporate elite is getting less.