/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/CULTURE-CANADA: Designer slums in the global village

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

Toronto, Jan 25 2000 (IPS) - The images are common enough on television screens around the world: IBM, for instance, depicts Sicilian grandmothers buying and selling over the Internet and tribal people in the remotest rainforests tapping away on their laptop computers.

Then there are teenagers around the globe wearing the same Nike sneaker, eating the same McDonalds hamburgers and listening to the same North American pop hits.

These and other examples of ‘corporate branding’ present an image of a small integrated world but, according to a new book published here this month, the image is false and ignores the down side of the new global culture. Canadian writer Naomi Klein, author of ‘No Logo – Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies’ published by Knopf-Canada argues that the economic divide is widening between the rich North and the poor South and the cultural choices in the North are narrowing within the so-called global village.

“This is the village where we are indeed connected to one another through a web of brands, but the underside of that web reveals designer slums like the one I visited outside Jakarta”, the 29- year old free lance journalists writes in her first book.

She writes about a 17-year old girl who assembles CD-ROM drives for IBM who tells the author that she makes computers “but we don’t know how to use computers.”

In taking aim at what she calls ‘brand bullies’ Klein argues that transnational corporations are extending their influence in developing countries by outsourcing an increasing amount of their product manufacturing and have dramatically increased their expenditures in marketing and advertising, where the emphasis is on building brand loyalty among consumers.

“Think of the brand as the core meaning of the modern corporation and of the advertisement as one vehicle used to convey that meaning to the world,” says Klein.

She traces the origins of brand building to a decision by U.S. tobacco company Philip Morris in 1993 to lower prices for its Marlboro cigarettes by 20 per cent in response to the cheaper bargain brands.

The advertising industry in the U.S. was full of talk of the end of prestige branding and the rise of no-name products competing on the basis of price. But instead of spending less money on brand building, many U.S. corporations ended up investing more, with a few prominent names in such lines as sneakers, computers, women’s lotions, clothes and coffee names like Nike, Reebok, Apple, the Body Shop, Calvin Klein, Disney, Levi’s, Benetton and Starbucks to mention a few – leading the way.

“These companies didn’t wear their image like a cheap shirt – their image was so integrated with their business that other people wore it as their shirt,” says Klein.

Two trends have developed since. Brand building has led to the spread of the big box bargain retail stores like Wal-Mart across North America and Europe with tens of thousands of product items and the decline of small independently owned shops.

Furthermore, what Klein calls “the extra premium attitude brands” that offer the essentials of lifestyle now threaten to dominate the cultural space. It is not uncommon, for instance, for films and television shows to contain product placements for major brands.

With large conglomerates controlling book publishers, film companies, television networks and sports teams, where is the room for artists and journalists to question corporate dominance in a time?, asks Klein.

Young people are particularly drawn to the allure of corporate labels, marketed on television and street billboards, as well as in corporate sponsored sports events and in course curriculum offered by companies to cash strapped schools across North America.

Often, it is the poorest of the youth that are most susceptible to the notion of acquiring status through the latest product labels, says Klein.

As Nike had demonstrated, it is not enough for companies to simply market their products to the youth demographic. “They would need to remake themselves in the image of nineties cool: its music, styles and politics,” says Klein.

Nike’s market research includes sending its people down to inner city neighbourhoods in American cities like New York City and Philadelphia to gauge the reaction to new styles and help build up a buzz for a product.

The practice is called “bro-ing,” with black urban youth are urgeed; “hey bro, check out the shoes.”

Clothes manufacturer Tommy Hilfiger went from a focus on preppy wear to an aesthetic taken from the hip hop music of Afro- American youth, which includes bolder colours, bigger and baggier styles, more hoods and cords and greater prominence for product logos and the Hilfiger name.

Klein says this “fetishization” of black culture by white culture in the U.S. is the latest strange chapter in American race relations.

She identifies some responses to the cultural onslaught. These include fforts by “culture jammers” to deface corporate street billboards with their own satirical posters in North America; the battle by unions to improve working conditions in factories in developing countries; the defeat of the Multi-lateral Agreement on Investment; and the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle.

“The claustrophobic sense of despair that has so often accompanied the colonialization of public space and the loss of secure work begins to lift when one starts to think about the possibilities for a truly globally minded society,” she says.