No Logo

by Naomi Klein

  I visited the Roots development at the construction phase in Ucluelet, a small town on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The site is called the Reef Point Resort and it is here that branding is being taken to the next level. In April 1999, the Roots Lodge wasn’t yet open, but construction was far enough along to make the concept perfectly clear: a high-end, fully branded summer camp for adults. Instead of canoes, an “adventure station” rents out ocean kayaks and surfboards; instead of outhouses, each cabin has its own hot tub; instead of the communal campfire, individual gas fireplaces. The lodge restaurant is set up mess-hall style, but the food is pure Pacific Coast gourmet. Most important, the rough-hewn wooden cabins are equipped with the entire Roots home furniture line.

  “Like living in a billboard,” one visitor observes as we receive our official tour, and that is no exaggeration. A cross between a catalog showroom and an actual living room, the resort has a Roots logo on display in the cabins on pillows, towels, cutlery, plates and glasses. The chairs, sofas, rugs, blinds and shower curtains are all Roots. On the wooden Roots coffee table is a brown leather Roots blotter, gently cradling a flattering book about the Roots story —and you can buy it all to take with you at the Roots store across the way. At the lodge, the “play” Wolf refers to lasts not a few hours but a weekend, maybe even a week or two. And the set at the company’s disposal includes not only the architecture and design of the buildings (as is the case with super stores), but the entire Canadian wilderness around the lodge: the eagle in the cedar outside the window, the old-growth forest that guests walk through to reach the cabins, the crashing waves of the Pacific.

  There is a strong symmetry at work in this branding exercise. The Roots clothing line got its genesis in a place not unlike this one. Company founders Don Green and Michael Budman both went to summer camp in Algonquin Park, Ontario, and were so moved by their experience of active living in the Canadian outdoors that they designed a line of clothing to capture the very best of that feeling: comfortable walking shoes, cozy sweatshirts, Canadian Workman socks, and, of course, the beaver logo. “Algonquin’s majestic hills, sparkling lakes and forest primeval inspired Roots,” states an early print advertisement. “Its golden summer days, cold starry nights, autumn blaze and still winter white are now recreated in the colours and spirit of Roots Algonquin.”14

  The pitch was anything but subtle, as journalist Michael Posner observed in 1993 when he wrote, “Here’s the truth: Roots is less a company than a summer camp.”15 The clothing manufacturer has been expanding on that carefully crafted image since the beginning. First it built retail outlets that, with the help of wall-mounted canoe paddles and exposed beams, conjure not a chain store but, as journalist Geoff Pevere writes, “summer-camp mess halls and cottages built by caring and callused hands.”16 Then came the homewear line, featuring blankets and pillowcases designed to look like oversized workmen’s socks. And now, full circle, comes the Roots Lodge, where the original “inspiration” for a line of clothing becomes a fully realized extension of the Roots brand: from summer camp to branded camp; from lifestyle marketing to the lifestyle itself.

  Mark Consiglio, the fast-talking, fleece-wearing developer of the resort, has bigger plans still for Reef Point, of which the Roots Lodge represents only a fraction of the available property. He shows me a model for a 250-cabin complex and explains his vision: a retail town center with brand-name stores and services. The Roots store, of course, but perhaps an Aveda Spa as well, and maybe stores like Club Monaco and the Body Shop too. Each retail outlet will be attached by boardwalk to its very own branded lodge, which, like the Roots Lodge, will be kitted with all the logo-festooned accessories the company can supply. Consiglio can’t name names yet —“still in negotiations” —but he does tell me pointedly that “Roots isn’t the only clothing company getting into homewear, you know. Everyone is doing it.”

  The problem with branded vacation destinations, however, is that they only provide temporary opportunities for brand convergence, an oasis from which families, at the end of the trip, are abruptly yanked and dumped back into their old lives, no doubt a poorly managed mishmash of competing logos and brand identities. Which is where Celebration, Florida, comes in — that very first Disney town. The meticulously planned development arrives complete with picket fences, a Disney-appointed homeowners’ association and a phony water tower. For the families who live there year-round, Disney has achieved the ultimate goal of lifestyle branding: for the brand to become life itself.

  Except the life on offer is perhaps not the one we might have expected from the Mouse. When Walt Disney first conceived of a branded city, it was meant to be an artificiality bonanza, a temple to the mid-fifties futuristic gods of technology and automation. The city never was built in Walt’s lifetime, though some of the ideas went into the Epcot Center sixteen years after his death. When Disney CEO Michael Eisner decided to pick up on Walt’s old dream and build a branded town, he opted against the Jetsons-inspired fantasy world his predecessor had imagined. Though wired with every modern technology and convenience, Celebration is less futurism than homage, an idealized re-creation of the livable America that existed before malls, big-box sprawl, freeways, amusement parks and mass commercialization. Oddly enough, Celebration is not even a sales vehicle for Mickey Mouse licensed products; it is, in contemporary terms, an almost Disney-free town —no doubt the only one left in America. In other words, when Disney finally reached its fully enclosed, synergized, self-sufficient space, it chose to create a pre-Disneyfied world —its calm, understated aesthetics are the antithesis of the cartoon world for sale down the freeway at Disney World.

  Like the gated communities that have sprung up across the U.S., on Celebration’s tranquil, tree-lined, billboard-free streets inhabitants are not subject to any of the stimulations or ravages of contemporary life. No Levi Strauss has bought up all the storefronts on Main Street to sell a new style of wide-legged pants, and no graffiti artists have defaced the ads; no Wal-Mart has left the downtown boarded up and twisted, and no community group has formed to fight the big boxes; no factory closures have eroded the tax base and pumped up the welfare rolls and no quarrelsome critics are around to point fingers. What is most striking about Celebration, however, particularly when compared with most North American suburban communities, is the amount of public space it offers —parks, communal buildings and village squares. In a way, Disney’s branding breakthrough is a celebration of brandlessness, of the very public spaces the company has always been so adept at getting its brands on in the rest of its endeavors.

  Of course this is an illusion. The families who have chosen to make Celebration their home are leading the first branded lives. As social historian Dieter Hassenpflug has remarked, “Even the streets are under Disney’s control — private space that pretend[s] to be public.”17 So Celebration is an intricate inversion of Tocqueville’s prediction: an “authenticity” bunker, specially retrofitted by the founder of fake.

  The whole idea reminds me of a place on Vancouver Island called Cathedral Grove, about an hour and half’s drive from the Roots Lodge and the mouth of Clayoquot Sound, Canada’s most cherished old-growth forest. The drive through this part of the world has converted thousands of unsuspecting tourists into environmental activists, and it’s easy to see why. After driving uphill for miles you reach a vista of mountains covered with lush cedars, sparkling lakes and drifting eagles —the wilderness that soothes and reassures the soul. The planet is as strong and rich as it ever was, it tells us — we just have to drive farther north to see it. But the serenity doesn’t last long. The next dip and climb brings a radically different view: two huge bald gray mountains so burned and scarred they look more like the moon’s surface than the earth. Nothing but death and asphalt for miles.

  Nestled in the folds of this psychic roller coaster is the entrance to Cathedral Grove. Every day, hundreds of cars pull over to the side of the road, and their passengers embark on foot, glossy brochures in hand, to see the on
ly old-growth trees left in the area. The largest tree has a rope around it and a plaque mounted on a stick. The irony, not lost on most residents of the area, is that this miniature park is owned and operated by MacMillan Bloedel, the logging company responsible for clear-cutting Vancouver Island and much of Clayoquot Sound. Cathedral Grove isn’t a forest but a tree museum — just as Celebration is a town museum.

  It’s tempting to dismiss Celebration and the idea of the branded town as the particular neurotic obsession of the Disney corporation: this isn’t a harbinger of the future privatization of public space, it’s just Walt playing God again from beyond the grave. But with virtually every superbrand openly modeling itself after Disney, Celebration should not be too readily dismissed. Of course Disney is ahead of the game —Disney invented the game —but as is always the case with the Mouse, there are many would-be imitators trailing behind, taking notes. From his perch as adviser to the top media conglomerates, Michael J. Wolf observes that theme-park-style shopping locations like Minneapolis’s Mall of America may be precursors to the live-in malls of the future. “Maybe the next step in this evolution is to put housing next to the stores and megaplexes and call it a small town. People living, working, shopping, and consuming entertainment in one place. What a concept,” he enthuses.18

  Setting aside, for a moment, the Brave New World/Stepford Wives associations such a vision inevitably evokes, there is something undeniably seductive about these branded worlds. It has to do, I think, with the genuine thrill of utopianism, or the illusion of it at any rate. It’s worth remembering that the branding process begins with a group of people sitting around a table trying to conjure up an ideal image; they toss around words like “free,” “independent,” “rugged,” “comfortable,” “intelligent,” “hip.” Then they set out to find real-world ways to embody those ideas and attributes, first through marketing, then through retail environments like superstores and coffee chains, then —if they are really cutting edge —through total lifestyle experiences like theme parks, lodges, cruise ships and towns.

  Why wouldn’t these creations be seductive? We live in a time when expectations for building real-world commons and monuments with pooled public resources —schools, say, or libraries or parks — are consistently having to be scaled back or excised completely. In this context, these private branded worlds are aesthetically and creatively thrilling in a way that is totally foreign to anyone who missed the postwar boom. For the first time in decades, groups of people are constructing their own ideal communities and building actual monuments, whether it’s the marriage of work and play at the Nike World Campus, the luxurious intellectualism of the Barnes & Noble superstores or the wilderness fantasy of the Roots Lodge. The emotional power of these enclaves rests in their ability to capture a nostalgic longing, then pump up the intensity: a school gym equipped with NBA-quality equipment; summer camp with hot tubs and gourmet food; an old-world library with designer furniture and latte; a town with no architectural blunders and no crime; a museum with the deep pockets of Hollywood. Yes, these creations can be vaguely spooky and sci-fi, but they should not be dismissed as just more crass commercialism for the unthinking masses: for better or for worse, these are privatized public utopias.

  Shrinking Options in the Privatized Town Square

  The terrible irony of these surrogates, of course, is how destructive they are proving to be to the real thing: to actual town centers, to independent business, to the non-Disney version of public spaces, to art as opposed to synergized cultural products and to a free and messy expression of ideas. Commercial climates are being dramatically altered by the expanding size and ambitions of these large players, and nowhere more so than in retail, where, as we have seen, companies like Discovery and Warner Brothers are in it for the “billboard effect” as much as for the sales. Independent shopkeepers, on the other hand, generally lack the resources to turn shopping into performance art, let alone into a destination vacation spot.

  As superstores adopt the production values and special effects of Hollywood, small business is getting caught between, on the one hand, the deep discounting of the Wal-Marts and on-line retailers like Amazon.com, and on the other the powerful draw of the theme-park-infused retail environments. These market trends are combining to drastically undermine the traditional concepts of value and individual service that small business is known for offering. The staff at the indies may be more experienced and knowledgeable than the assistants at the superstores (the high turnover doesn’t allow clerks to gain experience: more on that in the next section, “No Jobs”), but even that relative advantage can often get drowned out by the pure entertainment value of the superstores.

  As many have commented, this phenomenon has been particularly pronounced in the book industry, where membership in the American Booksellers Association has fallen startlingly from 5,132 in 1991 to 3,400 in 1999.19 Part of the problem is the Wal-Mart effect: the superstore chains have negotiated discounts on wholesale books with many publishers, making it nearly impossible for the independents to compete on price. The other difficulty is the retail standard set by the superstores. Bookstores are now expected to play the role of the university library, theme park, playground, pickup joint, community center, literary salon and coffee house all in one —a pricey undertaking even for the big players, which often involves taking a loss in the interest of future brand equity and market share. That has been the experience here in Canada, where the Canadian equivalent of Barnes & Noble, the bookstore chain Chapters, was able to open ten superstores in prime locations in 1997, while running at a loss of $2.1 million.20

  It is here, once again, that the economy of scale comes powerfully into play. Of course some independent bookstores have held their own against the chains by adding cafés, cozy reading chairs and cooking demonstrations, but there is only so far most independents can travel down the road of experiential shopping before they experience financial stress. If, on the other hand, they do nothing to compete, single, independent stores can all too soon begin to look like poor cousins next to the brandstravaganza unfolding across the street. The end result is a retail playing field where more books are being sold, but it is becoming as difficult for small retailers to compete as it is for independent film producers to go up against the major studios on the multiplex circuit. Retail has become a vastly unequal playing field; yet another industry —like film, television or software — where you have to be huge to stay in the game. Here once again is the strange combination of a sea of product coupled with losses in real choice: the signature of our branded age.

  A great deal of critical attention has been lavished on the effects of superstores on the book industry — partly because bookstore consolidation has clear implications for freedom of speech, and partly because media types tend to care more passionately about where they buy their books than where they buy their socks. In many ways, however, the bookstores are an anomaly in the superstore universe: they are multibrand stores, carrying books from thousands of book publishers, and they are primary business ventures, as opposed to being extensions, synergy schemes or 3-D billboards for brands primarily invested elsewhere. To see the animosity toward marketplace diversity most directly, one has to look not to the bookstores but to the pure branded superstores like those built by Virgin, Sony and Nike. It is there that the quest for total brand reach is revealed most starkly as the antithesis of marketplace diversity: like synergy itself, these stores seek name-brand cohesion, a safe logo cocoon apart from the warring messages of other brands.

  The Virgin megastores provide perhaps the clearest displays of this kind of brand cohesion, employing various intra-brand synergies to leapfrog over entire stages of consumer choice. In the past, record labels, no matter how much money they sank into promoting new artists, were still at the mercy of record-store owners and radio-and music-video station programmers (which is why the labels got themselves into so much legal trouble in the fifties for bribing deejays). No more. Virgin’s 122 megastores are wire
d up to be synergy machines, equipped with building-sized mural ads, listening stations for customers to sample new CDs, huge video screens, deejay booths, and satellite dishes to beam live concerts into the stores. This is par for the course in the age of the superstore, but since Virgin is also a record label, all of this technology can be harnessed to create a sense of breaking excitement about a new Virgin artist. “We’ll be featuring certain artists every month. That means we play them in the store, we can do live shows via satellite from another location and we can give them store presence,” says Christos Garkinos, vice president of marketing for Virgin Entertainment Group. “Think of what we can do for a developing artist.”21 More to the point, why wait around for something as temperamental as audience demand or radio play when by controlling all the variables you can create the illusion of a blockbuster success before it even happens?

  That is synergy, in a nutshell. Microsoft uses the term “bundling” to describe the expanding package of core goods and services included in its Windows operating system, but bundling is simply the software industry’s word for what Virgin calls synergy and Nike calls brand extensions. By bundling the Internet Explorer software within Windows, one company, because of its near monopoly in system software, has attempted to buy its way in as the exclusive portal to the Internet. What the Microsoft case so clearly demonstrates is that the moment when all the synergy wheels are turning in unison and all’s right in the corporate universe is the very moment when consumer choice is at its most rigidly controlled and consumer power at its feeblest. Similarly, in the entertainment and media industries, synergy nirvana has been attained when all of a conglomerate’s arms have been successfully coordinated to churn out related versions of the same product, like molded Play-Doh, into different shapes: toys, books, theme parks, magazines, television specials, movies, candies, CDs, CD-ROMs, superstores, comics and megamusicals.