by Naomi Klein
Perhaps the most disturbing manifestation of corporate censorship takes place when the space that is sold is not a place but a person. As we have seen, the high-stakes sponsorship agreements in the sports world first exerted their influence by deciding what logo athletes wore and what teams they played on. Now that control has expanded to what political views they may hold publicly. Daring political stands like Muhammad Ali’s opposition to the Vietnam War have long since been replaced by the soft-drink radicalism of NBA cross-dresser Dennis Rodman, as sponsors push their athletes to be little more than billboards with attitude. As Michael Jordan once commented, “Republicans buy sneakers too.”
Canadian sprinter Donovan Bailey learned that lesson the hard way. Days before he won the Olympic race that would make him the fastest man alive, Bailey came under attack for telling Sports Illustrated that Canadian society “is as blatantly racist as the United States.” Adidas, horrified that its branded property would risk alienating so many white sneaker buyers with such an unpopular opinion, rushed in to shut Bailey up. Adidas vice president Doug Hayes told The Globe and Mail that the comments “have nothing to do with Donovan the athlete or the Donovan we know”35 —seemingly attributing the views to a fictional alter-athlete who had possessed Bailey temporarily.
A similar case of branding censorship involved British soccer star Robbie Fowler. After the twenty-one-year-old scored the second goal against the Norwegian team Brann Bergen in March 1997, Fowler turned to the crowd, pulled up his official jersey, and revealed a red political T-shirt: “500 Liverpool dockers sacked since 1995,” the shirt said. The dockers have been on strike for years, fighting hundreds of layoffs and the shift to contract work. Fowler, a Liverpool boy himself, decided to publicize the cause when the world was watching. Ingenuously he commented: “I thought it would be just a simple statement.”36
He was, of course, mistaken. The Liverpool Football Club, which collects the toll on the branded messages that appear on the players’ official jerseys, raced in to stem any copycat actions. “We will be pointing out to all our players that comments on matters outside football are not acceptable on the field of play,” the club said in a hastily issued statement.37 And just to make extra sure that the only message on the athletes’ shirts would be from Umbro or Adidas, the European football governing body UEFA followed up by slapping Fowler with a fine of 2,000 Swiss francs.
There was yet another twist in this branded tale. The shirt Fowler revealed didn’t bear just any political slogan, it was also an ad bust: in a not-so-subtle subversion of a ubiquitous brand, the letters “c” and “k” in the word “dockers” had been enlarged and designed to look like Calvin Klein’s logo: docKers. When photographs of the T-shirt were splashed all over British newspapers, the designer threatened to sue for trademark violation.
When piled on together, such examples give a picture of corporate space as 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. And considering the speed with which these trends are developing, we clearly have good reason for alarm. But a word of caution: we may be able to see a not-so-brave new world on the horizon, but that doesn’t mean we are already living in Huxley’s nightmare.
In drawing up octopus-like charts of corporate ownership structures and quoting CEOs on their dreams of world domination, we may easily lose sight of the fact that censorship is not nearly as absolute as many a newly converted Noam Chomsky acolyte might like to believe. Instead of an airtight formula, it is a steady trend, clearly intensified by synergy and the mounting stakes of brand-name protection, but riddled with exceptions. It’s true, for example, that Viacom is coating the world in bubble gum through its Blockbuster and MTV holdings, but Viacom-owned Simon & Schuster has published some of the best critiques of unregulated economic globalization: Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh’s Global Dreams and William Greider’s One World, Ready or Not, among others. NBC and Fox did, however briefly, run Michael Moore’s series TV Nation, which gleefully went after advertisers and even targeted NBC’s parent company, General Electric. And while Disney’s purchase of Miramax inspired dark foreboding about the future of independent film, it was Miramax that distributed Moore’s anticorporate documentary The Big One —a film based on his similarly critical book, published by Random House, now owned by Bertelsmann. As, I hope, the book you are holding helps to prove, there is clearly still room for corporate critiques within the media giants.
In a sense, the shift that is taking place is at once less totalitarian and more dangerous. We haven’t lost the possibility for non-synergistic art, and serious critical work has a greater potential to reach wide audiences at this time than ever before in the history of art and culture. But we are losing the spaces in which the noncorporate-minded can flourish —those spaces are there, but they are shrinking as the captains of the culture industry become more enraptured by the dream of global cross-promotions. Much of this is a matter of simple economics: there are limited numbers of movies, books, magazine articles and programming hours that can be economically produced, published, broadcast, etc., and the window for the ones that don’t fit into the reigning corporate strategy narrows with every merger and consolidation.
There is a chance, however, that the current mania for synergy will collapse under the weight of its unfulfilled promises. Already, Blockbuster has become a dead weight around Viacom’s debt-ridden neck. The stock-market analysts blame “the quality of products coming through its stores”38 —and it probably doesn’t help that the chain has had to devote entire wings of its stores to showcasing some thirty-four copies of Kevin Kline’s unwatchable In & Out (or some other Paramount flop) because the folks at Viacom were determined to make back some of the millions they lost in theaters. And after its “eatertainment” outlets hemorrhaged money for two years, Planet Hollywood announced in August 1999 that it would file for bankruptcy protection. Another synergy scheme that looked foolproof on paper was the 1998 release of Godzilla. Sony thought it had its blockbuster status sewn up: it had a Madison Square Garden premiere, a made-for-Toys ‘R’ Us star, a $60 million marketing budget orchestrating a year-long “teaser” campaign, and a heavy-handed legal team cracking down on all unwanted publicity on the Internet. Most important, thanks to Sony’s newly consolidated movie theater holdings, the movie played on more screens than any film ever before: on launch day, 20 percent of all U.S. movie theater screens were playing Godzilla. Yet none of this could compensate for the simple fact that nearly everyone who saw Godzilla warned their friends to stay away, and they did, in droves.39
Even branding evangelist Tom Peters acknowledges that there is such a thing as too much brand, and impossible though it is to predict when we will reach that point, when we pass it, it will be unmistakable. “How much is enough?” asks Peters. “Nobody knows for sure. It’s pure art. Leverage is good. Too much leverage is bad.”40 MTV founder Tom Freston, the man who made marketing history by turning a television station into a brand, admitted in June 1998 that “you can beat a brand to death.”41
Indeed, by early 1998, Wall Street was declaring the unthinkable: Nike had outswooshed itself; its ubiquity had ceased to be a branding success story and had become a liability. “Nike’s biggest challenge is itself. They need to come up with another identity that they can still say, ‘This is Nike,’ but it’s something beyond the swoosh,” Josie Esquivel, a stock analyst with Morgan Stanley told The New York Times.42
Nike has attempted to respond to this challenge, as we shall see. But if such a backlash is possible against a single brand, then perhaps it’s conceivable that a similar phenomenon can apply equally to the act of branding as a whole: that after a certain amount of branding mania is stamped on a culture, those of us who have been branded — by Nike, Wal-Mart, Hilfiger, Microsoft, Disney, Starbucks, et al. —will begin to turn not just against these specific logos,
but also against the control that corporate power as a whole exerts over our spaces and choices. Maybe there is a moment when the idea of branding reaches a saturation point and the backlash is directed not at a product that suddenly finds itself on the wrong side of a fad but at the multinationals behind the brands.
There is some evidence that this process is already under way. As we will see in Part IV, “No Logo,” communities around the world, and at various generational levels, are no longer being blinded by the brands’ shiny promises of newness and of endless selection. Instead of swinging open their doors, they are organizing at community levels to block the arrival of big-box retailers; they are participating in street-level campaigns against Nike’s Third World labor practices and Shell Oil’s human-rights record. They are launching movements, like Britain’s Reclaim the Streets, to regain some fleeting public control over public space; and they are supporting anti-trust actions against companies such as Microsoft. Given the relative suddenness of the backlash, this wave of anticorporate hostility is understandably taking its targets by surprise. “A few months ago, everyone I met seemed to think that working for Microsoft was a pretty cool thing to do. Now, strangers treat us like we work for Philip Morris,” wrote Slate columnist Jacob Weisberg. The bewildered sentiment is shared by multinational employees across many sectors. “I don’t know how we are offending people,” said Starbucks regional marketing director Donna Peterson in May 1999. “But sometimes it seems we are.”43 And Royal Dutch/Shell head Mark Moody-Stuart told Fortune magazine, “Previously, if you went to your golf club or church and said, ‘I work for Shell,’ you’d get a warm glow. In some parts of the world that changed a bit.” And (as we will see in the examination of the Shell boycott in Chapter 16), that in itself is a bit of an understatement.
Mounting disillusionment in the face of the forces described here in “No Space” and “No Choice” is not, however, sufficiently widespread or deep to spark a genuine backlash against the power of the brands. In all likelihood, resentment at invasive advertising, the corporate takeover of public space, and monopolistic business practices would have festered as little more than run-of-the-mill cynicism had many of the same companies gobbling up both space and choice not decided simultaneously to bankroll their innovative branding forays by slashing jobs. It is this essential economic, human concern that has been a major force in contributing to the rise in anticorporate activism: No Good Jobs.
CHAPTER NINE
THE DISCARDED FACTORY
Degraded Production in the Age of the Superbrand
Our strategic plan in North America is to focus intensely on brand management, marketing and product design as a means to meet the casual clothing wants and needs of consumers. Shifting a significant portion of our manufacturing from the U.S. and Canadian markets to contractors throughout the world will give the company greater flexibility to allocate resources and capital to its brands. These steps are crucial if we are to remain competitive.
—John Ermatinger, president of Levi Strauss Americas division,
explains the company’s decision to shut down twenty-two plants
and lay off 13,000 North American workers between
November 1997 and February 1999
Many brand-name multinationals, as we have seen, are in the process of transcending the need to identify with their earthbound products. They dream instead about their brands’ deep inner meanings —the way they capture the spirit of individuality, athleticism, wilderness or community. In this context of strut over stuff, marketing departments charged with the managing of brand identities have begun to see their work as something that occurs not in conjunction with factory production but in direct competition with it. “Products are made in the factory,” says Walter Landor, president of the Landor branding agency, “but brands are made in the mind.”1 Peter Schweitzer, president of the advertising giant J. Walter Thompson, reiterates the same thought: “The difference between products and brands is fundamental. A product is something that is made in a factory; a brand is something that is bought by a customer.”2 Savvy ad agencies have all moved away from the idea that they are flogging a product made by someone else, and have come to think of themselves instead as brand factories, hammering out what is of true value: the idea, the lifestyle, the attitude. Brand builders are the new primary producers in our so-called knowledge economy.
This novel idea has done more than bring us cutting-edge ad campaigns, ecclesiastic superstores and utopian corporate campuses. It is changing the very face of global employment. After establishing the “soul” of their corporations, the superbrand companies have gone on to rid themselves of their cumbersome bodies, and there is nothing that seems more cumbersome, more loathsomely corporeal, than the factories that produce their products. The reason for this shift is simple: building a superbrand is an extraordinarily costly project, needing constant managing, tending and replenishing. Most of all, superbrands need lots of space on which to stamp their logos. For a business to be cost-effective, however, there is a finite amount of money it can spend on all of its expenses —materials, manufacturing, overhead and branding — before retail prices on its products shoot up too high. After the multimillion-dollar sponsorships have been signed, and the cool hunters and marketing mavens have received their checks, there may not be all that much money left over. So it becomes, as always, a matter of priorities; but those priorities are changing. As Hector Liang, former chairman of United Biscuits, has explained: “Machines wear out. Cars rust. People die. But what lives on are the brands.”3
According to this logic, corporations should not expend their finite resources on factories that will demand physical upkeep, on machines that will corrode or on employees who will certainly age and die. Instead, they should concentrate those resources in the virtual brick and mortar used to build their brands; that is, on sponsorships, packaging, expansion and advertising. They should also spend them on synergies: on buying up distribution and retail channels to get their brands to the people.
This slow but decisive shift in corporate priorities has left yesterday’s non-virtual producers —the factory workers and craftspeople — in a precarious position. The lavish spending in the 1990s on marketing, mergers and brand extensions has been matched by a never-before-seen resistance to investing in production facilities and labor. Companies that were traditionally satisfied with a 100 percent markup between the cost of factory production and the retail price have been scouring the globe for factories that can make their products so inexpensively that the markup is closer to 400 percent.4 And as a 1997 UN report notes, even in countries where wages were already low, labor costs are getting a shrinking slice of corporate budgets. “In four developing countries out of five, the share of wages in manufacturing value-added today is considerably below what it was in the 1970s and early 1980s.”5 The timing of these trends reflects not only branding’s status as the perceived economic cure-all, but also a corresponding devaluation of the production process and of producers in general. Branding, in other words, has been hogging all the “value-added.”
When the actual manufacturing process is so devalued, it stands to reason that the people doing the work of production are likely to be treated like detritus —the stuff left behind. The idea has a certain symmetry: ever since mass production created the need for branding in the first place, its role has slowly been expanding in importance until, more than a century and a half after the Industrial Revolution, it occurred to these companies that maybe branding could replace production entirely. As tennis pro Andre Agassi said in a 1992 Canon camera commercial, “Image is everything.”
Agassi may have been pitching for Canon at the time but he is first and foremost a member of Team Nike, the company that pioneered the business philosophy of no-limits spending on branding, coupled with a near-total divestment of the contract workers that make its shoes in tucked-away factories. As Phil Knight has said, “There is no value in making things any more. The value is added by careful research,
by innovation and by marketing.”6 For Phil Knight, production is not the building block of his branded empire, but is instead a tedious, marginal chore.
Which is why many companies now bypass production completely. Instead of making the products themselves, in their own factories, they “source” them, much as corporations in the natural-resource industries source uranium, copper or logs. They close existing factories, shifting to contracted-out, mostly offshore, manufacturing. And as the old jobs fly offshore, something else is flying away with them: the old-fashioned idea that a manufacturer is responsible for its own workforce. Disney spokesman Ken Green gave an indication of the depth of this shift when he became publicly frustrated that his company was being taken to task for the desperate conditions in a Haitian factory that produces Disney clothes. “We don’t employ anyone in Haiti,” he said, referring to the fact that the factory is owned by a contractor. “With the newsprint you use, do you have any idea of the labour conditions involved to produce it?” Green demanded of Cathy Majtenyi of the Catholic Register.7
