Topic > Branding Our Lives - 1348

In Naomi Klein's essay “No Logo” the author tells us how logos have replaced products, thus creating something known as “branding”. Klein tells us how this all started as a means to make sure consumers were getting the real deal, not one of the copycat products. And that during this time, the primary focus of several companies was the production of goods and services, so they could sell them to the public, and this was “the true gospel of the machine age” (Klein 275). And this remained the central concept, until the 1980s, when “a consensus emerged that companies were bloated, oversized; they owned too much, employed too many people, and were burdened with too many things” (Klein 275). And this led many business leaders to believe that producing and being responsible for their employees “began to feel less like a path to success and more like an awkward responsibility” (Klein 275). And the way businesses survive is by adapting to the new way the world works, and that's why many business leaders have started down the path to a world of logos only. And all this started from an idea born out of necessity, which then became very popular, and now almost all companies put their logo on their products. But this was not the end, because the underlying reason was the search for a way to make a company weightless, and the gospel of this era was, as Klein said, “whoever owns less, has fewer employees on the book pay". and produces the most powerful images, unlike the products, wins the race” (275). And corporate marketing managers changed the role of advertising “from a product information bulletin to a b... half sheet... was the secret, it seems, of all the success stories of the late 1980s and early of the 80s. nineties. According to what Klein tells us, “there has never really been a brand in crisis, only brands that have had a crisis of confidence” (280). In other words, Klein believes that the branding process has never had any kind of crisis, because the idea still survives, but individual brands have suffered from the crisis, but in the end, the only thing that matters is the process, “the war on public and individual space: on public institutions such as schools, on youth identities, on the concept of nationality, and on the possibilities of unmarked spaces” (275). In conclusion, the branding process was created for the survival of a group of people, but it holds a leash and is able to completely control many groups of people. It is a war that still continues, and has been going on for two centuries.