The Branding of Learning and Identity Marketing from No Logo, Leanne Jackett

The Branding of Learning and Identity Marketing from No Logo

Leanne Jackett

The Branding of Learning (Chapter 4)

In the nineties, just when schools were facing deep budget cuts, the cost of delivering modern education was rising steeply. Schools that couldn't even afford new textbooks were suddenly expected to provide students with costly technological equipment. This forced schools to look to alternative funding sources for help. So much so that corporate partnerships and sponsorship seemed to be the only way out of the high-tech bind--especially for those schools in poorer areas. Not surprisingly, the corporations that come to save the day carry with them an agenda of their own.

The sponsoring companies' goal is to plant themselves into the core curriculum of the schools and in some cases it is working. They argue that the students can still learn by reading about their company, writing about their brand, researching brand preference, and drawing for their next ad campaigns. Thus, they save time and money by making the students do the work for them.

At Vancouver's Laurier Annex School, students in grades 3 and 4 were put to work for the BC restaurant chain White Spot. Over a period of months in '97, the children developed new packaging concepts for the kid's menu, and the following year they designed an entire concept for birthday parties. The students gave a corporate presentation, which included sample commercials, menu items, party games and cake ideas, which took into account safety, food allergies and low costs. 9-year-old Jeffery Ye said, "It was a lot of work." But if you ask this writer, this is our first-world version of sweatshop labour. It is hard to believe, but some educators agree with market researchers that these assignments are empowering and educational.

Furthermore, with their large sums of money and presence on campuses, corporations also brought with them image control, logo visibility, brand extension opportunities, and fierce protection of trade secrets. In '96 at the University of Wisconsin, Reebok included a "non-disparagement" clause in their contract which prohibited members of the university community from criticizing the athletic gear company. This is stifling our safe-haven of freedom of expression and speech--the local university campus--with conflicts of interest.

In '96 at the duMaurier Tennis Open Tournament at York University, an anti-smoking group - the Grim Reaper Society - asked York for permission to pass out pamphlets near the stadium. Their request was denied but clever activists handed out pamphlets folded like a fans to motorists at a nearby intersection. The pamphlet/fans with anti-smoking slogans were brought inside by tournament goers to cool themselves off. Soon enough police officers hired by the tournament broke up the peaceful off-site protest citing traffic problems and ticketed two of the activists and seized all remaining fans.

Corporations were also fast to infiltrate school cafeterias. At the time the book was published in 2000, 13 % of US schools had allowed companies like Subway and McDonald's to set up in cafeterias. This number, I am sure, has greatly increased. Subway even distributes a guide about how to access the in-school market for franchise opportunities and pitches their ideas to school boards as a way of keeping students from sneaking out on their lunch hour and getting in trouble.

Fast food is usually twice as expensive as cafeteria fare, meaning kids from poorer families are usually stuck with the daily glop while their classmates feast on Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. And many schools sign agreements with the chains that prohibit the serving of "generic versions" of their fast food. This means that kids can't even have a cheaper (and probably healthier) version of a hamburger because it constitutes "unfair competition".

Fast food infiltration in Canadian schools is highly evident and recently one school in Coquitlam tried to fight back. The Vancouver Sun featured an article by Janet Steffenhagen about this incident. Cindi Seddon, principal at Pitt River Middle School decided that enough was enough and in September 2003 the students returned to school to find a new cafeteria menu. With solid backing from parent committees and staff, Seddon stopped the insanity of offering KFC, McDonald's, and Pizza Hut to her students in the cafeteria. She replaced them with nutritious foods--like fresh sandwiches, bagels, real macaroni and cheese, and fruit--meant to aid growing bodies. She also wiped out the junk in the vending machine and replaced them with granola bars and juice.

Sadly, Seddon's efforts were short-lived. Though her actions were purely in the interest of the children, she could not beat the corporation. Even though one third of Canadian children are overweight (CTV), with childhood obesity linked to high-fat, high-sugar diets and reduced physical inactivity, Seddon's efforts were still halted. District officials ordered the menu be returned to the fast food version, citing that it was the school boards who had the power to make cafeteria menu decisions, not the principal or the parent committee.

Art Foster, director of food services, originally brought fast food to Coquitlam cafeterias in 1999. His goal was a purely economic one - keep kids on campus at lunch hour eating the food they want so they won't seek it out elsewhere; therefore the cafeteria will not drain the school budget and revenues would rise. Despite opposition from teachers' unions, Foster went ahead and set up food courts in cafeterias similar to those in malls. Chair of the Coquitlam school board, Holly Butterfield, agreed with the decision to keep the fast food menu saying that it is variety that the students and parents want. She also said the provincial health authority's call for a ban on the sale of junk food in schools will unlikely affect Coquitlam because the public doesn't share this view.

Butterfield's arguments are somewhat suspicious though. One can't help but wonder if it is corporate money and contracts that forced the Coquitlam school board to overturn their own principal's intelligent decision.

Klein describes this access to the schools as the ultimate "cool hunting" opportunity for companies. Sponsorship and fast-food kiosks are merely a building block. Klein explains this as every lunchroom and classroom being a focus group waiting to be focused.

You might be wondering how these companies gained access to the sanctity of the classroom. Teachers' unions in North America were vocal about the threat of commercialization on education; however, despite this resistance, there was never one big issue on which the opposition could band together to fight for and win a policy on classroom commercialization. The move to allow commercialization in the classroom, as Klein puts it, did not take the form of one sweeping decision, but rather of thousands of little ones. These were often given no debate and went unnoticed.

Patriarchy Gets Funky: The Triumph of Identity Marketing (Chapter 5)

Making our way through formal education, we will now focus on the university campus. Much of Klein's personal involvement with campus activism beginning in the late eighties is the source for this chapter. She begins by explaining that the politics on campus and in the outside world were very different.

The activism on campus was focused on "identity politics," focusing on issues of representation. She explains that what held back women and minorities was the absence of visible role models occupying powerful social positions and the constant media-perpetuated stereotypes reinforcing the supremacy of white men. Before the media transformed itself, Asians and lesbians were invisible, gays were stereotyped as deviant, blacks were criminals, and women were weak and inferior.

Klein can point to a shift in the attitude of the media in August '92. This is when the mainstream outside the universities began to pay attention to campus activists. They finally realized that diversity was what they wanted, and diversity was what they were going to get.

This shift in attitude, however, was thought to result from hard economic calculations. In 1997, Yankelovich Partners, a consumer research firm, labeled "diversity" as the hallmark of Gen-Xers, as opposed to "individuality" for baby boomers, and "duty" for their parents. This important realization came soon after two other important realizations:

Consumer companies would only survive if they built corporate empires out of brand identities.
The ballooning youth demographic held the key to market success.

Every forward-thinking company would have to adopt a theme of diversity. Starbucks did this with their tie-dyed third-world aura. The Body Shop filled their windows with red ribbons condemning violence against women. Bennetton grabbed diversity by the balls in the mid-nineties with their multicultural advertising challenging stereotypes everywhere, and their commercial exploitation of human suffering.

This was frustrating for activists when they realized that their ideal of political rebellion was, as Klein puts it, deeply non-threatening to the smooth flow of business as usual. Identity politics weren't fighting the system anymore; they were the auto-catalyst of diversity commercialization.

At the same time Klein was protesting for better cultural representation, the global marketplace was accelerating due to freer trade. Successful corporations increased their total advertising so that they were forcing the world to absorb their messages. This globalization meant a young boy from Japan was eating McDonald's hamburgers and a young Brazilian girl was listening to the Spice Girls. Rather than tailoring advertisements for different markets, campaigns were selling diversity to all markets at once. Diversity marketing was suitable to sell across the world and it thus contributed to a capitalist monoculture. Advertisers were in heaven because their ads were suitable everywhere.

Works Cited

Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2000.

"One-third of Canadian kids overweight: study." CTV.ca. 19 Oct. 2002. www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1034954142429_30363342?s_name=&no_ads. 24 March 2004.

Steffenhagen, Janet. "Fast food back on school menu: Coquitlam school district chooses revenue over nutrition." The Vancouver Sun. 3 Nov. 2003: A.1.

Young boy eating hamburger. http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1066307816015_100?s_name=&no_ads

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