It’s been almost 6 years now that Naomi Klein has published her worldwide bestseller “No Logo!”, in which she takes the reader behind the scenes of the manufacturing facilities in the developing world that provide our brand-obsessed culture with its products. She points out how the low level of prices for many of our everyday products can only be achieved by other’s “paying” for it by working under terrible conditions: Child labour and so-called “sweatshops” as the reverse side to our shiny shopping world. She also predicts that people in our world will no longer tolerate this once they find out about how their Nike shoes were produced.
The publication of her book coincided with the formation of the globalization-criticist movement and she herself expressed her hopes for this movement to change the way our whole culture would think about brands and the downsides of economic globalization. People should see behind the curtain and question the practices of our corporations by hesitating to buy products that, for instance, were produced by underaged children in the developing world. Naomi Klein seemed pretty optimistic that such a change, elicited by a worldwide movement, would be on it’s way.
What happenened since then? Did we experience a major change in how the average consumer spends his money?
I don’t think that anything really changed. There are reasons for that and it is time to analyze them and think about new ways for such a movement to be succesful - leading us to what I call responsible capitalism.

• In an image- and brand-driven culture, what image does the globalization criticist movement have?
  The average citizen got to know this movement as hooded black mob rioting in front of every annualy summit of international trading organizations. However, the average citizen does not identify with hooded black mobs. Instead of trying to forcefully convince the WTO to change some of their arguable practices and trading laws, they better should have tried to reach the general public with their messages by ensuing a more reasonable way of “branding” of their own ideas and goals. One big mistake that has been made was to put this movement in proximity to communistic ideas by sympathizing with regimes as Fidel Castro’s and their underlying ideology - a fondness that is not shared by most people in our culture who in my opinion rightly believe that there is no alternative to capitalism. The idea of a responsible consumer, who rejects to buy products that have been produced under inhuman conditions presumes a capitalistic system, yet one with a different kind of shopping and information culture. Creating a better world is not about abandoning capitalism. It’s about taking it to the next level by enlightening the consumer. For the majority of people, today’s question is not whether to buy a camera or not, but which camera one should buy. (I owe this idea to Kristian). So apparently it’s not “No Logo”, but rather “Know Logo”!
• What do I mean with shopping and information culture? Today, shopping and information primarily band together in advertising. This kind of information comes from the companies which want to promote their products and generate needs for them. It is everywhere - on the TV, on the Radio, on every internet search, on walls, on subway stations and on-spot, in the malls and supermarkets. There is a whole science and industry behind the way this information is presented and brought to us consumers. It takes advantage of the latest technology to reach its adressees in the most effective way. I’d like to categorize this kind of information as industry-to-consumer shopping information.
  On the other hand, there is the consumer-generated shopping information. Some part of it is an industry itself, e.g. product testing magazines and webpages, which normally are concerned about the quality of a product in terms of its performance and performance-price ratio. Although an industry, I already put this in the category of consumer-to-comsumer shopping information, since the ones who write those reviews have to put themselves into the shoes of a consumer. Then, there are several non-profit-organizations that “generate” shopping information. The kind of information they provide depends on their backgrounds: Ecological NPO’s are concerned with the enviromental sustainability of the to-report-on product or company (e.g. “does this product/company have any connection genetically manipulated stuff?”) , while globalization-criticist NPO’s keep track of the circumstances under which a product has been produced (”Child labor”?).
  Yet the most powerful way of consumer-to-consumer shopping information lies in what is known as “word-of-mouth“, the direct recommendation or dissuasion by one’s immediate personal enviroment. Marketers and advertisers from the industry-to-consumer camp enviously look at the power of this kind of shopping information: No advertisement and also, no product review can be that convincing and effective as the recommendation or dissuasion by a trusted person. The digital camera I use now is a Canon IXUS 40. Before I bought it, I was visiting my father who owns the Canon IXUS 800. Since he was absolutely satisfied by its performance, I didn’t even bothered to read many product reviews, let alone checking out any advertising promises. And since I don’t regret the decision to have bought it, my friend Niko now got the IXUS 50 - on my recommendation. Word-of-mouth recommendations are amazingly powerful, as NPO product information can be, given the consumer believes in the cause of the respective organzation.
  Yet I believe that the true potential of consumer-2-consumer information hasn’t been tapped, which in my opinion is the main reason for the hitherto failure of the globalization-criticist movement. Let’s look at the obvious differences between the industry-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer information camps: While the former operates with high-tech methods and enourmous amounts of money, the latter drags behind both fincancially (it’s “non-profit”) and methodologically. I go to the supermarket and I am flooded with ads, that is industry-to-consumer information, while the only chance to get consumer-to-consumer information on a product would be to call a friend or someone at, say Greenpeace (”Do I have their number? Do I have the time? Do they have the time to take all those calls?”). The perception of advertisement doesn’t take time, it happens en passant and everywhere. To check back on real information takes time, I need to browse the NPO’s databases to find out whether a company employs underaged workers. That’s the difference and that’s the problem.

I think that the solution to this problem lies in a more efficient organization of consumer-to-consumer communication channels. The industry is using high-tech methods - this has to be embraced by consumers and NPO’s as well. Information about products and companies has to be available on the spot, that is right were we are making our economic decisions, looking at and buying products. We have seen how powerful word-of-mouth information can already be even though it uses methods that are a few thousand years old. Imagine the possibilities once consumers start to update their ways of communication to a modern standard.

With KnowLogo.org, I am going to start a blog (and possibly a NPO) that precisely addresses these issues. My aim is to outline new ways for a responsible capitalist movement and to review considerable technology.

As a first step, I’d like to introduce 3 principles that concern the structure of future consumer-to-consumer information - How do we need this information to be?

• Accesibility: The information should be available wherever I need it.
• Reliability: The information should be only from sources that I trust. I should be in charge to decide where I get my information from.
• Digestibility: The information should be short, precise and meaningful. There should be a common standard for company/product reviews.

For this enterprise I hope to be joined by some of my best friends, Johannes, Niko and Kristian.
The webpage knowlogo.org will be set up in the next few weeks.

UPDATE: Currently, I no longer can pursue the KnowLogo idea, even though I still think the claims I made are valid. Yet I have to many other projects to focus on right now, which I consider to be more important.

technorati tags: activism , no logo, capitalism, advertising, npo

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