Originally published in 2000, and in the author's own admission, No Logo needs updating. However, it's still very relevant today. If you believe market-driven globalization is destroying lives and democracy, this book is for you. ( )

support small businesses, campaign for corporate regulation, and skip the last section of this book ( )

It's not your typical marketing consultant book by any stretch of the imagination, after all, Naomi, is not of the Zyman, Reis, or Trout family of marketing writers. Those guys write about Positioning, Focus, (excellent works by the way) and how the only thing that matters in marketing is selling more things to more people more often. After reading Zymans "The End of Marketing as We Know It", you'd think there was nothing more important this world than getting people to consume until they explode or go bankrupt.
No Logo takes an entirely different tack. Branding, yea, it gets it due here. Most companies in the US don't make anything anymore. They build brands; they don't build products. Nike, whatever companies made the clothes on your back, or branded the computer you're reading this review on didn't sell you a product. They sold you an image. Maybe they sold your kids an image you finally broke down and bought at the expense of something else.
Cash strapped schools are great place to set the brand hook early. The kids might come home wired and fat from the Taco Bell lunches and Coke machines around every corner, moving one step closer to diabetes or heart disease every day. These days maybe we should just be happy the brand are there to step in and help out where public funding no longer makes the grade. As long as your kid isn't like Mike Cameron who got suspended for wearing a Pepsi shirt to school on "Coke day", there is nothing to worry about, right?
It's intuitive from the consumer side, particularly when we look around and see all the "stuff" we have for which there is really no need. Brands rule, branding "works"; it gets people to buy more stuff more often at increasingly higher prices, often required to offset the cost of the branding campaigns.
That's great unless yours is an industry that has or is in the process of outsourcing production of the actual material goods to an "Export Processing Zone" and your job entails some part of the production process. If it can be made in an overseas sweatshop and shipped back over here, chances are it will be in the not to distant future. It'll be interesting to see what effect the move to the brand based company has on the current and future economy of the US.
So maybe you think it's crazy (or not) that companies here spend billions just create images and perceptions to drive demand for products made elsewhere. Image becomes everything, however, an image can also be extremely fragile. People in glass houses don't throw rocks anymore, the lawyers protecting those fragile brands do. Sometimes it's shutting down fan sites or user groups on the net or trying to block the dissemination of informational leaflets that may not paint an ideal rosy picture of the brand. As was the case with McDonalds in the McSpotlight case, some times the brands take a beating. The glass house comes crumbling down. Sometimes it just takes a few brave sould to stand up for what they believe in.
No Logo will make you think. It might arouse a passion deep within to get involved and look for a ways to bring about change or affect your future career (hint - the money is in brand marketing!). It ought to be required reading for any student of marketing, if for no other reason to provide a sense of balance and awareness of how marketing and branding fits into the business process these days. ( )

This was published in 2000, coming out during the time when the internet bubble was riding high but before the fall of the Two Towers (the ones in NY, not Tolkein's).

Its subject matter was Shell, McD's, and Nike. Social awareness was getting a second wind after languishing in general and now it was all about sweatshops. Multinational corporations became our favorite bogeymen (again), and this was when we could throw our weight behind small-time activists and FEEL like we could accomplish some great-seeming things... like getting all the exploiters out of Burma so as to take away the support of that regime.

Remember those times?

Add awareness to the whole Banding idea, the feeling that Corporations are real people with souls (ha), and see this as a way to stop bad practices by attacking their PR image.

Then realize that the problem goes sooooooo much deeper. Much deeper than this book is prepared to take it, except to realize that these highly visible multinational corporations were great as a rallying point but even if anyone could break them down and hold them accountable, it was EVERY OTHER corporation doing the exact same thing that makes the situation seem rather hopeless.

So, and rightly so, this book does not delve into the economics and politics that made the rape of underdeveloped countries possible: the policies and the greed and the perfectly legal practices that can ravage whole countries, their land, and devastate indigenous peoples.

It can't. It's a problem that requires widespread awareness everywhere... and the knowledge of all the interrelated contributing factors... to combat.

We all need to be aware and awake to not just the fact of injustice, but the causes. The only real way we can combat this problem is by waking the real slumbering beast of humanity from its ignorant dream. :)


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First published in 2000, No Logo is still a book with a lot to say. I'm a bit surprised by some reviews of it suggesting that it's not well-written, that it's 'pseudo-intellectual' - neither of which are true. The style may not be to everyone's taste, and some sections are less interesting and strong than others, but overall - to naive folk like me - it's a real wake-up call. The book details the evolution of the brand, how this led to a whole new breed of firm, and the damaging impact that this has had not only on the less well-off (third world), but on first world society also. This is all well-researched and strongly argued, and it's very much to the book's credit that what's most shocking is what is also best documented. There's no controversy about it, it's not some extremist conspiracy theory: this is the world we're living in. Read it!

Gareth Southwell is a philosopher, writer and illustrator.