Canadian author and former Varsity editor Naomi Klein makes her mark with her international bestseller No Logo. Klein examines the success of the business world and discloses corporations’ strategic marketing to unsuspecting buyers and promotion of products as ways of living, as “brand identity or corporate consciousness.” No Logo offers a concise history of the primacy of advertising and the development of its influence, as well as the increasing refusal of activists to accept corporate globalization and the growth and popularity of phoney business bigwigs.
I’ve worked in retail stores and have been an employee in places like Gap Kids. Reading this book, I acquired a disturbing awareness of what corporation I was really dealing with and what problem I was unknowingly contributing to.
I spent a period of time frantically checking the labels on my clothing, becoming increasingly aware that all the while I had been stuck right in the middle of the very corporate campaign I was trying to run away from.
“If consumers are like roaches,” writes Klein, ”then marketers must forever be dreaming up new concoctions for industrial-strength Raid. And nineties marketers, being on a more advanced rung of the sponsorship spiral, have dutifully come up with clever and intensive new selling intrusive techniques to do just that.” Reading this in-depth analysis of globalization broadened my own views and made me want to demand something more from corporations—justice (it will be difficult, but worth it in the end).
—Glynnis Mapp, Varsity Intern
