No Logo Quotes

In 1974, Norman Mailer described the paint sprayed by urban graffiti artists as artillery fired in a war between the street and the establishment.

“You hit your name and maybe something in the whole scheme of the system gives a death rattle. For now your name is over their name... your presence is on their presence, your alias hangs over their scene.”

Norman Mailer, “The Faith of Graffiti” Esquire, May 1974, 77 Twenty-five years later, a complete inversion of this relationship has taken place. Gathering tips from the graffiti artists of old, the superbrands have tagged everyone - including the graffiti writers themselves. No space has been left unbranded.

No Logo p73

China

All in all, the so-called global teen demographic is estimated at one billion, and these teenagers consume a disproportionate share of their families' incomes. In China, for instance, conspicuous consumption for all members of the household remains largely unrealistic. But, argue the market researchers, the Chinese make enormous sacrifices for the young - particularly for young boys - a cultural value that spells great news for cell-phone and sneaker companies. Laurie Klein of Just Kid Inc., a U.S. firm that conducted a consumer study on Chinese teens, found that while Mom, Dad and both grandparents may do without electricity, their only son (thanks to the country's one-child policy) frequently enjoys what is widely known as “little emperor syndrome,” or what she calls the “4-2-1” phenomenon: four elders and two parents scrimp and save so the one child can be an MTV clone. “When you have the two parents and four grandparents spending on one child, it's a no-brainer to know that this is the right market,” says one venture capitalist in China.

“Western Companies Compete to Win Business of Chinese Babies,” Wall Street Journal, May 15th, 1998. The quotation comes from Robert Lipson, president of U.S.-China Industrial Exchange Inc.

Furthermore, since kids are more culturally absorbent than their parents, they often become their families dedicated shoppers, even for big household items. Taken together, what this research shows is that while adults may still harbor traditional customs and ways, global teens shed those pesky national hang-ups like last year's fashions. “They prefer Coke to tea, Nikes to sandals, Chicken McNuggets to rice, credit cards to cash,” Joseph Quinlan, senior economist at Dean Witter Reynolds Inc. told The Wall Street Journal.

The message is clear: get the kids and you've got the whole family and the future market.

p118, 119

The Branding of Music

In 1993, the Gap launched its “Who wore khakis?” ads, featuring old photographs of such counterculture figures as James Dean and Jack Kerouac in beige pants. The campaign was in the cookie-cutter co-opation formula: take a cool artist, associate that mystique with your brand, hope it wears off and makes you cool too. It sparked the usual debates about the mass marketing of rebellion, just as William Burroughs's presence in a Nike as did at around the same time.

Fast forward to 1998. The Gap launches its breakthrough Khakis Swing ads: a simple exuberant miniature music video set to “Jump, Jive 'n' Wail” - and a great video at that. The question of whether these ads were "co-opting" the artistic integrity of the music was entirely meaningless. The Gap's commercials didn't capitalize on the retro swing revival - a solid argument can be made that they caused the swing revival. A few months later, when singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright appeared in a Christmas-themed Gap ad, his sales soared, so much so that his record company began promoting him as “the guy in the Gap ads.” Macy Gray, the new R&B “It Girl”, also got her big break in a Baby Gap ad. And rather than the Gap Khaki ads looking like rip-offs of MTV videos, it seemed that overnight, every video on MTV - from Brandy to Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys - looked like a Gap ad; the company has pioneered it own aesthetic, which spilled out into music, other advertisements, even films like The Matrix. After five years of intense lifestyle branding, the Gap, it has become clear, is as much in the culture-creation business as the artists in it's ads.

p45

Culture Jamming / Situationists

It was Guy Debord and the situationists, the muses and theorists of the theatrical student uprising of Paris, May 1968, who first articulated the power of a simple detournment, defined as an image, message or artifact lifted out of its context to create a new meaning. But though culture jammers borrow liberally from the avant-garde art movements of the past - from Dada and Surrealism to Conceptualism and Situationism - the canvas these art revolutionaries were attacking tended to be the art world and its passive culture of spectatorship, as well as the anti-pleasure ethos of mainstream capitalist society. For many French Students in the late sixties, the enemy was the rigidity and conformity of the Company Man; the company itself markedly less engaging. So where Situationist Asger Jorn hureled paint at pastoral paintings bought at Flea markets, today's culture jammers prefer to hack into corporate advertising and other avenues of corporate speech. And if the culture jammers' messages are more pointedly political than their predecessors', that may be because what were indeed subversive messages in the sixties - “Never Work,” “It Is Forbidden to Forbid,” “Take Your Desires for Reality” - now sound more like Sprite or Nike slogans; Just Feel It. And the "situations" or "happenings" staged by the political pranksters in 1968, though genuinely shocking and disruptive at the time, are the Absolut Vodka ad of 1998 - the one featuring purple-clad art students storming bars and restaurants banging on bottles.

p282, 283