No Logo 1st chapter summary

No Logo 1st Chapter

The first chapter of No Logo, by Naomi Klein, talks about the emergence of brands and how companies started to emphasize on selling brand names instead of the products themselves. In the 1980s, the corporations and big brands that came about started to rely more on marketing instead of selling. Before that, the products where sold as coffee, tea, cookies, but with the emergence of brands the competition on the market grew and suddenly ‘Jacobs’ and ‘Colgers’ coffee gave the customer a choice. Brands were a way of separating from the competition and selling your product through marketing in a special and different way: through a lifestyle and logos, such as McDonalds golden arches. The lifestyle sold to the customer through the brand showed familiarity and quality, and caused a sudden boom in the growth of industries. Another event that led to the increase of brands was Philip Morris buying "Kraft" for 12.6 billion dollars in 1988. Wall Street, a few years later, declared brands as dead, but the companies/brands started to advertise their products and many survived the Wall Street crash. One great example of such a brand and logo is Marlboro and the Marlboro man, who is one of the first brands with a logo, and also one which has been successful for a long time. No Marlboro Friday or cutting prices stopped many companies from their success, and today our lives are overflowing with brands and advertisements.