No Logo

No Logo

They're the biggest companies of the world, they only buy something, they never sell; they only give back a "logo", their name, their own brand applied on each stupid object that without it wouldn't been sold.

Buying shoes or t-shirt or pc or hamburger you enter Nike world, Benetton's, Microsoft or Mc Donald, you buy a lifestyle and the companies didn't anything to earn money but only make you think without them your life would be worse.

Since '80s, when the obsession for trade-mark was born, the real product wasn't anymore a product, just a brand. With a crocodile or some letters (like ADIDAS) on it a "no-price" white t-shirt become really expensive. So a company to survive doesn't need any longer the simple advertising, but the branding.

Before the consumery of the '80s who would have thought an entire district would be pink painted for a Barbie TV event? Or that we had to thank Yves Saint Laurent for making our Chrismas colorful and happier with his brand everywhere in the streets? And the list Naomi Klein wrote down in four years of research it's really long and disgusting.

Another theoretic of branding is David Lubars -of Omnicom group- who define the consumers as "some beatles: after a bit the usual insecticide is not good anylonger, you must spray on them with something stronger!"

With branding was born also a colonization of the common way of thinking, the culture and schools by the companies. For Miss Klein was "heartbreaking"to see how the barrier between branding and education was no longer existing: Mc Donald's or Burger King's canteen in each school, how to reconstruct a Nike shoe (in 800 primary school) given by the company, chair Yahoo! at Stanford University, Kmart at Wayne State University.

What is one more advertising for a young person who heard too much of this shit every day?

Nike has got no factory; but Nike's plants exist in 70 countries of the world with 27 million people underpayed. Sometimes a scandal make us thinking of it, but in a week all is gone again: we have our problems, we can be horrified by these events, but we have to care of our world; th big companies said only "also us had to pay a high price for industrial revolution, a lot of peoples died for progress".

But there is no evolution in Mexico or Birmania or India: no goods, no wealth stop there.

There is only a hope: "Reclaim the streets", one of the more active movements against global movements. It's nopt enough but it's a good way to start.