No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

by Naomi Klein

These were the Nikes and Apples and, later, the Tommy Hilfigers and Starbucks and so on. These pioneers had a different model: Create a transcendent idea or brand surrounding your company. Use it to connect with consumers who share its values. Then charge a steep premium for products that are less about the objects themselves than about the profound human desire to be part of a tribe, a circle of belonging. So when kids lined up all night to buy $250 Nike sneakers, they weren’t exactly buying the sneakers; they were buying the idea of “Just Do It” and the dream of Michael Jordan, who had become a one-man Superbrand, a term first used to describe the athlete’s growing empire. When their parents bought Apple computers, they were bringing home a piece of a deeply optimistic vision of the future, captured in the slogan “Think Different.” (The aura of authenticity increased with each revolutionary and artistic icon, living or dead, whose face graced the campaign: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Picasso, Mandela, the Dalai Lama.) And when commuters were suddenly paying four times what they used to for a cup of coffee, it was because Starbucks wasn’t really selling coffee; it was selling, according to its CEO, the idea of the “third place,” not home, not work. (The third place used to be actual community spaces where people would gather without the help of corporations, but those spaces were fast disappearing.)