Don't Lump Brands with Sweatshops. - Review - book review

Most marketers are familiar with the power of religious and political conservatives to undermine products and brands which offend the traditionalists' family and other values. The simple fear of boycotts provokes a caution--some might say self-imposed censorship--in promoting or selling potentially offensive products.

Potentially more explosive, in part because they lack a single set of values or a fixed agenda, are the activists on the left who are working to change where and how products are manufactured, with a special emphasis on the economic, labor, environmental and human rights standards found in factories around the world. While these activists believe all Third World factories are suspect, they have achieved maximum public exposure in the affluent West by focusing their spotlight on the most famous of the global brands.

No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies by Naomi Klein (Picador) chronicles the relatively recent effort at forcing a transformation of the global workplace by holding brand giants up to public scorn if the factories they use fail to meet or exceed an undefined, and ever changing, level of compliance. Rejecting any guise of objectivity Klein makes clear which side she's on and that she's ready for battle.

While global corporations are unlikely targets of sympathy (and Klein gives them none), a critique can be made which distinguishes the value of brands to society from the legitimate concern that our consumer dollars not support squalid working conditions, especially for underage laborers. No Logo makes no such distinction, and also blames global brands for subverting public discourse and hijacking virtually all of our cultural centers, among other sins. Klein, and others of the anti-corporate left, lump brands and manufacturing practices together when the two are actually separate phenomena.

It may not be the role of polemicists like Klein to present a balanced view, offering a look at what's good about the "enemy," but I can think of lots of socially useful roles for brands, particularly in an ever faster-paced, ever more widely traveled world. While brands do sometimes misfire, or, as may be seen at this week's Licensing Show in New York, do sometimes get overextended, consumers won't long accept a brand that no longer adequately meets their wants and needs. Even for elite, well-educated consumers, brands provide information which helps to relieve the stress surrounding buying decisions. They are both a confirmation of one's judgment and a shorthand way of communicating what the consumer can expect. At their best, brands evoke memories and help create shared experiences. Great brands bring people from different generations and from disparate cultures together. In short, brands help to globalize communications and to create a common point of reference.

All of which is definitely not to say enlightened marketers can close their eyes to working conditions at factories, far away and owned by others, making goods bearing their brand.

Although Phil Knight and Nike might not agree, these anti-sweatshop activists shouldn't simply be dismissed as Luddites. Indeed, they very likely do us all a favor for at least three reasons. First like Henry Ford, who paid his workers more than the then-prevailing wage so that they could live middle class lives (and buy Ford cars!),global companies have a stake in assuring that prosperity be not just a local phenomenon but a universal one.

Second, when high-profile Nike is tortured, all others making goods in Third World factories are put on notice: No hiding behind contractors and subcontractors. You are the customer for these goods, and consumers or retailers may, at their whim, choose to clobber you if working conditions are shown to be unduly even if not uniquely exploitative. Finally for the vast majority of marketers and corporate execs who--contrary to the image in TV and movies--are not driven by profits at any price, these activists simply alert them to unacceptable conditions which they ordinarily become eager, or at least willing, to fix.

Ultimately No Logo's prediction of a new, anti-corporate political movement focused on undermining the biggest of the global brands will rest not on Naomi Klein and her fellow activists, but on the ability of the corporate world to anticipate these grievances and to transform their organizations--out of altruism or self-interest--before a consumer-inspired deluge strikes.

Seth M Siegel is co-chairman of The Beanstalk Group, N.Y., a licensing agency whose global clients include Coca-Cola, Harley-Davidson and McDonald's.

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