The medium was the running shoe, and the message, well, let’s talk about the message. Something to do with commercial speech versus free expression. First World guilt and consumer lust. Interactivity and individualism. But most of all, about the sound (loud) that the big brands make when they fall down hard.

We’re talking, of course, about the Little Shoe That Couldn’t. In January, Jonah Peretti took up Nike on its offer of personalized "iD" shoes, ordered off the web. Instead of his name or a nickname like, say, "Jammer," Peretti asked to have the word "sweatshop" emblazoned on his sneakers. The worm turned a few times – "It’s slang!" cried the PR department – before Nike ducked out its escape hatch. Some messages, reads the fine print, "we consider inappropriate or simply do not want to place on our products."

The rest, as they say, is viral history. By rough estimate, the email transcript circled the world approximately three zillion times. Meanwhile, a report by the Transnational Resource and Action Center of San Francisco indicted Nike, once again, for continuing to rely on Asian sweatshop labor. It hardly mattered. As Peretti’s jam shows, the Nike brand is indelibly associated with exploitation. Nike = Sweatshops.

The sweatshop shoe was an accidental experiment in the limits of branding, the corporate imperative that emerged in earnest in 1997 (when "brand," the verb, entered the lexicon). The idea – to build a connection between people and products that is emotional, even moral – is proving to be dangerous.

The private, for-profit Nike still holds on to its original platitudes – the message The Onion lampooned as "Make It Happen, Children Of The Earth" – but it now shares its brand power with its opponents. People still buy the shoes that say "Just Do It," but they know they’re helping Nike do it to some kid in Vietnam.

Brand damage is a strange and expanding gray area in consumer culture. The brand power of cigarette makers – and the food companies they’re buying up – has been radically reduced. Auto manufacturers are sliding. And the biotech industry is setting up for a fall: desperate for the kind of public approval that calms jittery shareholders, it has made a cavalier promise that genetically-modified foods will save the world’s malnourished. It’s a blind run into a moral minefield.

On March 1, the logophiliacs at Young & Rubicam, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, declared, "Brands are the new religion." The most powerful, the company said, are the "belief brands," like Nike, that spread a "meaning and purpose to life" with the passion of the early Christians and Muslims.

The anti-corporate movement is taking on the new faith, and the first signs of success are among the jammed brands. It’s a lesson every priest and mullah understands: today’s apostle is tomorrow’s heretic.

- James MacKinnon

From the May/Jun 2001 issue of Adbusters magazine.