No Logo Quotes

“Competitive branding became a necessity of the machine age — within a context of manufactured sameness; image-based difference had to be manufactured along with the product.”
― Naomi Klein, No Logo

“Ever since, a select group of corporations has been attempting to free itself from the corporeal world of commodities, manufacturing and products to exist on another plane. Anyone can manufacture a product, they reason (and as the success of private-label brands during the recession proved, anyone did). Such menial tasks, therefore, can and should be farmed out to contractors and subcontractors whose only concern is filling the order on time and under budget (ideally in the Third World, where labour is dirt cheap, laws are lax and tax breaks come by the bushel). Headquarters, meanwhile, is free to focus on the real business at hand — creating a corporate mythology powerful enough to infuse meaning into these raw objects just by signing its name.”
― Naomi Klein, No Logo

“At around this same time a new kind of corporation began to rival the traditional allAmerican manufacturers for market share; these were the Nikes and Microsoft’s, and
later, the Tommy Hilfiger’s and Intel’s. These pioneers made the bold claim that producing
goods was only an incidental part of their operations, and that thanks to recent victories in
trade liberalization and labour-law reform; they were able to have their products made for
them by contractors, many of them overseas. What these companies produced primarily
were not things, they said, but images of their brands. Their real work lay not in
manufacturing but in marketing. This formula, needless to say, has proved enormously
profitable, and its success has companies competing in a race toward weightlessness:
whoever owns the least has the fewest employees on the payroll and produces the most
powerful images, as opposed to products, wins the race.”
― Naomi Klein