No Logo

by Naomi Klein

  The laboratory for this radical vision was Iraq under U.S. occupation. From the start Rumsfeld planned the troop deployment like a Wal-Mart vice-president looking to shave a few more hours from the payroll. The generals wanted 500,000 troops, he would give them 200,000, with contractors and reservists filling the gaps as needed —a just-in-time invasion. In practice, this strategy meant that as Iraq spiraled out of U.S. control, an ever more elaborate privatized war industry took shape to prop up the bare-bones army. Blackwater, whose original contract was to provide bodyguards for U.S. envoy Paul Bremer, soon took on other functions, including engaging in combat in a battle with the Mahdi Army in 2004. And as the war moved into the jails, with tens of thousands of Iraqis rounded up by U.S. soldiers, other private contractors even performed prisoner interrogations, with some facing accusations of torture. The sprawling Green Zone, meanwhile, was run as a corporate city-state, with everything from food to entertainment to pest control handled by Halliburton. Just as companies like Nike and Microsoft had pioneered the hollow corporation, this was, in many ways, a hollow war. And when one of the contractors screwed up —Blackwater operatives opening fire in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, for instance, leaving seventeen people dead, or Halliburton allegedly supplying contaminated water to soldiers — the Bush administration, like so many hollow brands before, was free to deny responsibility: these were independent contractors, they could argue, there was nothing the government could do but review the contract. Blackwater, which had prided itself on being the Disney of mercenary companies, complete with a line of branded clothing and Blackwater teddy bears, responded to the scandals by —what else? —rebranding. Its new name is Xe Services.

  The dream of a hollow state was realized in its purest form at the Department of Homeland Security, a branch of government that, because it was brand new, could be built as an empty shell from the start. Jane Alexander, deputy director of the research wing of the DHS, explained, “We don’t make things. If it doesn’t come from industry, we are not going to be able to get it.” She sounded like former Nike CEO Phil Knight when he explained back in the nineties that, “There is no value in making things any more.” Unlike Nike, however, which tells its contractors what kind of products to make, the Department of Homeland Security didn’t even do that. When it decided it needed to build “virtual fences” on the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada, for instance, Michael P. Jackson, deputy secretary of the department, sent the word out to contractors: “This is an unusual invitation…. We’re asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business.” The department’s inspector general explained that Homeland Security “does not have the capacity needed to effectively plan, oversee and execute the [Secure Border Initiative] program.”

  That same kind of can’t-do attitude applied even when the financial system imploded in the fall of 2008 and the U.S. Treasury stepped in with a $700-billion bank bailout. Not only did it fail to attach meaningful strings to the money, but it announced that it did not have the capacity to administer the program. It needed to outsource the rescue of the banks to the very banks that created the disaster and were receiving the bailout funds. A case in point was The Bank of New York Mellon, which received $3 billion. The bank was also awarded the juiciest “master custodian” contract, worth an estimated $20 million, to administer the bailout. As Bank of New York Mellon President Gerald Hassell explained, “It’s the ultimate outsourcing — because the Federal Reserve and the Treasury do not have the mechanics to run the entire program, and we’re essentially the general contractor across the entire program.”

  It was a striking admission. By the end of eight years of self-immolation under Bush, the state still has all the trappings of a government — the impressive buildings, presidential press briefings, policy battles — but it no more did the actual work of governing than the employees at Nike’s Beaverton campus actually stitched running shoes. Governing, it seemed, was not its core competency.

  The Bush administration’s determination to mimic the hollow corporations it admired extended to its handling of the anger its actions inspired around the world. Rather than actually changing or even adjusting its policies, it launched a series of ill-fated campaigns to “rebrand America” for an increasingly hostile world. First came Charlotte Beers, hired as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite the seniority of the post, Beers had no previous diplomatic experience. She had, however, held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, where she built brands for everything from dog food to power drills. When Secretary of State Colin Powell came under criticism for the appointment, he shrugged it off: “There is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something. We are selling a product. We need someone who can rebrand American foreign policy, rebrand diplomacy.” Besides, he said, “She got me to buy Uncle Ben’s rice.”

  Only a few months in, the experiment was in disarray. Beers’s propaganda materials were greeted with derision. And when she went on a mission to Egypt to improve the perception of the United States among Arab opinion makers, Beers ended up getting lectured on U.S. military bases, blanket support for Israel and wars with unacceptably high levels of civilian casualties. After Beers quietly returned to the private sector, the same thing happened to her successor, Karen Hughes, when she went on several “listening tours,” focusing in particular on forging a bond as a “working mother” with Muslim women. In Ankara, she was informed by a group of Turkish women’s rights activists that the idea that the United States was an advocate for women’s freedoms would remain laughable so long as the occupation of Iraq continued. “This war is really, really bringing your positive efforts to the level of zero,” Hidayet Sefkatli Tuksal, an activist with the Capital City Women’s Forum, told Hughes. Fatma Nevin Vargun, a Kurdish feminist, added that, “War makes the rights of women completely erased, and poverty comes after war —and women pay the price.” Hughes kept a low profile for the remainder of her tenure.

  Watching these cringeful attempts to rebrand America during the Bush years, I was convinced that Price Floyd, former director of media relations at the State Department, had it right. After resigning in frustration, he said that the United States was facing mounting anger not because of the failure of its messaging but because of the failure of its policies. “I’d be in meetings with other public-affairs officials at State and the White House,” Floyd told Slate magazine. “They’d say, ‘We need to get our people out there on more media.’ I’d say, ‘It’s not so much the packaging, it’s the substance that’s giving us trouble.’” Exactly. A powerful, imperialist country is not like a hamburger or a running shoe. You can’t get the whole world to change its opinion of it just by getting “out there [to] tell our story,” as Charlotte Beers put it. America didn’t have a branding problem; surely it had a product problem.

  I used to think that, but I may have been wrong. When Barack Obama was sworn in as president, the American brand could scarcely have been more battered —Bush was to his country what New Coke was to Coca-Cola, what cyanide in the bottles had been to Tylenol. Yet Obama, in what was perhaps the most successful rebranding campaign of all time, managed to turn things around. “The election and nomination process is the brand relaunch of the year,” declared David Brain, CEO of Edelman Europe, Middle East and Africa, a global public relations giant. Kevin Roberts, global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, set out to depict visually what the new president represented. In a full-page graphic commissioned by the stylish Paper Magazine, he showed the Statue of Liberty with her legs spread, giving birth to Barack Obama. America, reborn.

  So, it seemed that the United States government could solve its reputation problems with branding —it’s just that it needed a branding campaign and product spokesperson sufficiently hip, young and exciting to compete in today’s tough market. The nation found that in Obama, a man who clearly has a natural feel for branding and who has surrounded himself wit
h a team of top-flight marketers. His social networking guru, for instance, is Chris Hughes, one of the young founders of Facebook. His social secretary is Desirée Rogers, a glamorous Harvard MBA and former marketing executive. And David Axelrod, Obama’s top advisor, was formerly a partner in ASK Public Strategies, a PR firm which, according to BusinessWeek “has quarter-backed campaigns” for everyone from Cablevision to AT&T. Together, the team has marshaled every tool in the modern marketing arsenal to create and sustain the Obama brand: the perfectly calibrated logo (sunrise over stars and stripes); expert viral marketing (Obama ring tones); product placement (Obama ads in sports video games); user-generated content (Obama Girl? Genius!); a 30-minute infomercial (which could have been cheesy but was universally heralded as “authentic”); and the choice of strategic brand alliances (Oprah for maximum reach, the Kennedy family for gravitas, and no end of hip-hop stars for street cred).

  The first time I saw the “Yes We Can” video, the one produced by Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am, featuring celebrities speaking and singing over a Martin Luther King-esque Obama speech, I thought —finally, a politician with ads as cool as Nike. The ad industry agreed. A few weeks before he won the presidential elections, Obama beat out Nike, Apple, Coors and Zappos to win the Association of National Advertisers’ top annual award, Marketer of the Year. It was certainly a shift. In the nineties, brands upstaged politics completely. Now corporate brands were rushing to piggyback on Obama’s caché (to wit: Pepsi-Cola’s “Choose Change” campaign, Ikea’s “Embrace Change ’09,” and Southwest Airlines’ offer of “Yes You Can” tickets).

  Indeed everything Obama and his family touches turns to branding gold. J.Crew saw its stock price increase 200 percent in the first six months of Obama’s presidency, thanks in part to Michelle’s well known fondness for the brand. Obama’s much-discussed attachment to his BlackBerry has been similarly good news for Research In Motion. The surest way to sell magazines and newspapers in these difficult times is to have an Obama on the cover, and you only need to call three ounces of vodka and some fruit juice an Obamapolitan or a Barackatini and you can get $15 for it, easy. In February 2009, Portfolio magazine put the size of “the Obama economy” — the tourism he generates and the swag he inspires —at $2.5 billion. Not at all bad in an economic crisis. Desirée Rogers, the White House’s social secretary, got into trouble with some of her colleagues when she spoke too frankly with The Wall Street Journal. “We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand,” she said. “Our possibilities are endless.”

  The exploration of those possibilities did not end, or even slow, with the election victory. Bush had used his ranch in Crawford, Texas, as a backdrop to perform his best impersonation of the Marlboro Man, forever clearing brush, having cookouts and wearing cowboy boots. Obama has gone much further, turning the White House into a kind of never-ending reality show starring the lovable Obama clan. This too can be traced to the mid-nineties branding craze, when marketers grew tired of the limitations of traditional advertising and began creating three-dimensional “experiences” — branded temples where shoppers could crawl inside the personality of their favourite brands. Desirée Rogers sounds just like those branding gurus when she speaks about the White House as the “crown jewel” of the Obama brand, a physical space where the administration can embody the values of transparency, change and diversity that drew so many voters out on Election Day.

  That means much talk of the importance of healthy eating (“Let’s hear it for vegetables!” Michelle and a gaggle of school children cheered at the unveiling of the South Lawn garden. “Let’s hear it for fruit!”) —but also field trips to Five Guys Burgers so no one thinks the Obamas are too preachy. It means corralling A-list celebrities to perform random acts of mentorship —but also staying down-to-earth enough to redecorate the girls’ bedrooms at Pottery Barn. And most of all it has meant, in addition to the usual state dinners, an endless procession of multicultural celebrations: the fountain dyed green on Saint Patrick’s Day, a seder on Passover, a special gathering for the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo. As a brand, the Obama White House’s identity is probably closest to Starbucks: hip, progressive, approachable —a small luxury you can feel good about even during tough economic times.

  Perhaps there is nothing wrong with this. Why shouldn’t a president who wants to change the country benefit from marketing as good as Starbucks and Nike? Every transformative movement in history has used strong graphic design, catchy slogans and, yes, fashion to build its base. Fifteen years ago, Nike appropriated the imagery of the civil rights movement and the icons of sixties counter-culture to inspire cult-like devotion to running shoes. Obama has used our faded memories of those same movements to revive interest in actual politics; surely that’s a step up. So the problem is not that Obama is using the same tricks and tools as the superbrands; anyone wanting to move the culture these days pretty much has to do that. The problem is that, as with so many other lifestyle brands before him, his actions do not come close to living up to the hopes he has raised.

  Though it’s too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do know this: he favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison — while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who authorized torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy while championing the fantasy of “clean coal” and refusing to tax emissions, the only sure way to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels. Similarly, he will slam the unacceptable greed of banking executives, even as he hands the reins of the economy to consummate Wall Street insiders Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, who have predictably rewarded the speculators and failed to break up the banks. And most importantly, he will claim to be ending the war in Iraq, and will retire the ugly “war on terror” phrase —even as the conflicts guided by that fatal logic escalate in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  This preference for symbols over substance, and this unwillingness to stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, is where Obama decisively parts ways with the transformative political movements from which he has borrowed so much (his pop-art posters from Che, his cadence from King, his “Yes We Can!” slogan from the migrant farmworkers’ Si Se Puede!). These movements made unequivocal demands of existing power structures: for land distribution, higher wages, ambitious social programs. Because of those high-cost demands, these movements had not only committed followers but serious enemies. Obama, in sharp contrast not just to social movements but to transformative presidents like FDR, follows the logic of marketing: create an appealing canvas on which all are invited to project their deepest desires but stay vague enough not to lose anyone but the committed wingnuts (which, granted, constitute a not inconsequential demographic in the U.S.). Advertising Age had it right when it gushed that the Obama brand is “big enough to be anything to anyone yet had an intimate enough feel to inspire advocacy.” And then their highest compliment: “Mr. Obama somehow managed to be both Coke and Honest Tea, both the megabrand with the global awareness and distribution network and the dark-horse, upstart niche player.”

  Another way of putting it is that Obama played the anti-war, anti-Wall Street party crasher to his grassroots base, which imagined itself leading an insurgency against the two-Party monopoly through dogged organization and donations gathered from lemonade stands and loose change found in the crevices of the couch. Meanwhile, he took more money from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate, swallowed the Democratic Party establishment in one gulp after defeating Hillary Clinton, then pursued “bipartisanship” with crazed Republicans once in the White House.

  Does Obama’s failure to live up to his lofty brand cost him? It didn’t at first. An int
ernational study by Pew’s Global Attitudes Project, conducted five months after he took office, asked people whether they were confident Obama would “do the right thing in world affairs.” Despite the fact that there was already plenty of evidence that Obama was continuing many of Bush’s core international policies (albeit with a far less arrogant style), the vast majority said they approved of Obama —in Jordan and Egypt, a fourfold increase from the Bush era. In Europe the change in attitude could give you whiplash: Obama had the confidence of 91 percent of French respondents and 86 percent of Britons — compared with 13 percent and 16 percent respectively under Bush. The poll was proof that “Obama’s presidency essentially erased the battering the USA’s image took during eight years of the Bush administration,” according to USA Today. David Axelrod puts it like this: “What has happened is that anti-Americanism isn’t cool anymore.”