No Logo Quotes
"As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard." - David Ogilvy
"The astronomical growth in the wealth and cultural influence of multinational corporations over the last fifteen years can arguably be traced back to a single, seemingly innocuous idea developed by management theorists in the mid-1980s: that successful corporations must primarily produce brands, as opposed to products."
"Manufacturing products may require drills, furnaces, hammers and the like, but creating a brand calls for a completely different set of tools and materials."
"An editorial that appeared in Fortune magazine in 1938, argued that the reason the American economy had yet to recover from the Depression was that America had lost sight of the importance of making things."
"The very process of producing—running one’s own factories, being responsible for tens of thousands of full-time, permanent employees—began to look less like the route to success and more like a clunky liability."
"Consumers, he says, 'are like roaches—you spray them and spray them and they get immune after a while.'"
"The brands would be okay, Wall Street concluded, so long as they believed fervently in the principles of branding and never, ever blinked."
"Advertising is about hawking product. Branding, in its truest and most advanced incarnations, is about corporate transcendence."
"But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool." - Phil Knight, CEO of Nike
"The top half—Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Disney, and so on—are pure ‘players’ in brainware. The bottom half FordandGMFord and GMFordandGM are still lumpy-object purveyors..." - Tom Peters
"In the year 2005 we might have Wu-Tang furniture for sale at Nordstrom."
"What Phil [Knight] and Nike have done is turn me into a dream."
"We were sitting around the office one day and we said, ‘What if we took Kenyan runners and transferred their skills to cross-country skiing?’"
"The insecurities go round and round the boardroom table, turning ad writers, art directors and CEOs into turbo-powered teenagers, circling in front of their bedroom mirrors trying to look blasé."
"For now your name is over their name…your presence is on their Presence, your alias hangs over their scene."
"Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture."
"The choice we have in this country is for our educational system to join the electronic age and communicate to students in ways they can understand and to which they can relate."
"At the moment we’re ensuring that Pepe is seen in the right places and on the right people."
"Like a depoliticized, hyper-patriotic Benetton, Hilfiger ads are a tangle of Cape Cod multiculturalism."
"The youth market is an untapped wellspring of new revenue."
"For this reason, the in-school computer network ZapMe! doesn’t merely sell ad space to its sponsors; it also monitors students’ paths as they surf the Net and provides this valuable market research, broken down by the students’ sex, age and zip code, to its advertisers."
"This kind of detailed market research is exploding in North American schools: weekly focus groups, taste tests, brand-preference questionnaires, opinion polls, panel discussions on the Internet, all are currently being used inside classrooms."
"In explaining the merits of a cereal taste test, the principal of Our Lady of Assumption elementary school in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, said: 'It’s a learning experience. They had to read, they had to look, they had to compare.'"
"Finished assignments are passed on to the companies and the best entries win prizes and may even be adopted by the companies—all subsidized by the taxpayer-funded school system."
"Coca-Cola ran a competition asking several schools to come up with a strategy for distributing Coke coupons to students. The school that devised the best promotional strategy would win $500."
"Advertising historian Stuart Ewen writes that as early as the 1920s, teaching kids to consume was seen as just another way of promoting patriotism and economic well-being."
"U.S. college sports is a big business in its own right with sales of merchandise generating $2.75 billion in 1997, a higher figure than the merchandising sales of the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League."
"The deal contained a 'non-disparagement' clause that prohibited members of the university community from criticizing the athletic gear company."
"The University of Kentucky’s deal with Nike, for instance, has a clause that states that the company has the right to terminate the five-year $25 million contract if the 'University disparages the Nike brand…or takes any other action inconsistent with the endorsement of Nike products.'"
"The study found that companies maintained the right to block the publication of findings in 35 percent of cases, while 53 percent of the academics surveyed agreed that 'publication can be delayed.'"
"Many people, upon learning of the advanced stage of branded education, want to know where the university faculty, teachers, school boards and parents were while this transformation was taking place."
"Unlike the very public standoffs over prayer in schools or over explicit sex education, the move to allow advertisements did not take the form of one sweeping decision but, rather, of thousands of little ones."
"As an undergraduate in the late eighties and early nineties, I was one of those students who took a while to wake up to the slow branding of university life."
"The branded multinationals may talk diversity, but the visible result of their actions is an army of teen clones marching—in 'uniform,' as the marketers say—into the global mall."
"All of these three retail phenomena, and the impact they are having on consumer choice, are about much more than changes to the way we shop."
"If Wal-Mart was selling Tide at deep discounts, so much the better, but these formerly brand-conscious shoppers were just as happy to take home detergent from Wal-Mart’s own private label, Great Value."
"The year before the so-called brand crash was a record one for Wal-Mart, during which it opened 161 new discount stores—unheard-of growth for the end of a recession."
"For many of their loyal consumers, no price is too high to pay for these branded goods and, in fact, merely buying the products provides an insufficient relationship."
"The proliferation of Nike Towns, Disney Stores and Starbucks clusters is powerful evidence of a renewed reverence for a handful of élite lifestyle brands."
"Mergers and Synergy: The Creation of Commercial Utopias."
"I would prefer ABC not cover Disney. —Disney CEO Michael Eisner, September 29, 1998, National Public Radio."
"We are surrounded now by the realization of Tocqueville’s predictions: gleaming, bulbous golden arches; impossibly smooth backlit billboards; squishy cartoon characters roaming fantastically fake theme parks."
"Every kid wants to hold a piece of the cartoon world between his or her fingers—that’s why the licensing of television and movie characters for toys, cereals and lunchboxes has spawned a $16.1 billion annual industry."
"A true branded loop cannot be created overnight, which is why the process usually begins with the simplest form of brand extension, a giant merger."
"Sometime in the early nineties, writes Michael J. Wolf, the attitude of his media industry clients underwent a philosophical change."
"It is this insistent desire to become one with your favorite pop-culture products that every one of the superbrands—from Nike to Viacom to the Gap to Martha Stewart—is trying to harness and expand upon."
"In some instances, the assault on choice has moved beyond predatory retail and monopolistic synergy schemes and become what can only be described as straightforward censorship."
"Corporate censorship has everything to do with the themes of the last two chapters: media and retail companies have inflated to such bloated proportions that simple decisions about what items to stock in a store or what kind of cultural product to commission now have enormous consequences."
"What is most striking about Celebration, however, particularly when compared with most North American suburban communities, is the amount of public space it offers—parks, communal buildings and village squares."
"Quite simply, every company with a powerful brand is attempting to develop a relationship with consumers that resonates so completely with their sense of self that they will aspire, or at least consent, to be serfs under these feudal brandlords."
"The brand in question may well represent a corporation with a budget larger than that of many countries, and a logo that is among the world’s most transcendent symbols, one that has aggressively sought to replace the role played by art and media."
"For better or for worse, these are privatized public utopias."
"Just as privately owned words and images are being adopted as a de facto international shorthand, so too are private branded enclaves becoming de facto town squares—once again, with troubling implications for civil liberties."
"For the past 25 years, Nike has provided good jobs, improved labor practices and raised standards of living wherever we operate."
"The overwhelming mainstream view among economists is that the growth of this kind of employment is tremendous good news for the world’s poor."
"For a business to be cost-effective, however, there is a finite amount of money it can spend on all of its expenses—materials, manufacturing, overhead and branding—before retail prices on its products shoot up too high."
"The reason for this shift is simple: building a superbrand is an extraordinarily costly project, needing constant managing, tending and replenishing."
"Freedom without opportunity is a devil’s gift."
"What’s good for General Motors is good for the country."
"There is no value in making things any more. The value is added by careful research, by innovation and by marketing."
"The difference between products and brands is fundamental. A product is something that is made in a factory; a brand is something that is bought by a customer."
"It seems that no matter how successfully the private sphere emulates or even enhances the look and feel of public space, the restrictive tendencies of privatization have a way of peeking through."
"Machines wear out. Cars rust. People die. But what lives on are the brands."
"Development built on starvation wages, far from kick-starting a steady improvement in conditions, has proved to be a case of one step forward, three steps back."
"The transience woven into the fabric of free-trade zones is an extreme manifestation of the corporate divestment of the world of work."
"A sense of impermanence is blowing through the labor force, destabilizing everyone from office temps to high-tech independent contractors."
"Every corporation wants a fluid reserve of part-timers, temps and freelancers to help it keep overheads down and ride the twists and turns in the market."
"The quintessential free agent. Based on a 'culture jam' from Adbusters."
"What is distressing about this trend is that over the past two decades, the relative importance of the service sector as a source of jobs has soared."
"Most of the large employers in the service sector manage their workforce as if their clerks didn’t depend on their paychecks for anything essential."
"Trouble began in 1990 when the Internal Revenue Service challenged Microsoft’s classification of orange badges as independent contractors."
"The fear of flying has been looming large in Cavite of late."
"The most sophisticated culture jams are not stand-alone ad parodies but interceptions—counter-messages that hack into a corporation’s own method of communication to send a message starkly at odds with the one that was intended."
"The billboard artist’s goal is to throw a well-aimed spanner into the media’s gears, bringing the image factory to a shuddering halt."
"Culture jamming baldly rejects the idea that marketing—because it buys its way into our public spaces—must be passively accepted as a one-way information flow."
"Culture jammers borrow liberally from the avant-garde art movements of the past—from Dada and Surrealism to Conceptualism and Situationism."
"A good jam, in other words, is an X-ray of the subconscious of a campaign, uncovering not an opposite meaning but the deeper truth hiding beneath the layers of advertising euphemisms."
"Culture jamming is anything, essentially, that mixes art, media, parody, and the outsider stance."
"Culture jamming is the activist artist as antimarketer, using a childhood filled with Trix commercials, and an adolescence spent spotting the product placement on Seinfeld, to mess with a system that once saw itself as a specialized science."
"The street party is only a beginning, a taster of future possibilities."
"To date there have been 30 street parties all over the country. Imagine that growing to 100, imagine each one of those happening on the same day, imagine each one lasting for days on end and growing."
"Reclaim the Streets is just playful and ironic enough to finally make earnestness possible."
"The street party has defied easy labeling: they camouflage identifiable leaders, and have no center or even a focal point. RTS parties ‘swirl’."
"The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And those that are killing it have names and addresses." - Utah Phillips
"It can take 100 years to build up a good brand and 30 days to knock it down." - David D’Alessandro
"The desire for community is then fulfilled elsewhere, through spectacle, sold to us in simulated form."
"Our corporations are stealing their lives."
"The resistance will be as transnational as capital."
"We want power given back to the people as a collective."
"Taking back what should have been ours all along."
"The real street, in this scenario, is sterile. A place to move through not to be in."
"Community becomes commodity—a shopping village, sedated and under constant surveillance."
"Nike contributed this money so my children can have a better education, but at whose expense? At the expense of children who work for six cents an hour?"
"A company which profits from child labor in Pakistan ought not to be held up as a hero to Edmonton children."
"Nike wasn’t really acting all that sorry about it."
"Nike, Nein, Ich Kaufe Es Nicht! (Nike—No, I Don’t Buy It!)"
"Nike’s branding power is thoroughly intertwined with the African-American heroes who have endorsed its products."
"Nike Soyez Sport! (Nike Be a Sport) Just Duit (It’s just money)"
"Nike has led the way in abandoning the manufacturing workers of the United States."
"We didn’t think that the Nike situation would be as bad as it seems to be."