"America is Not a Hamburger" - A BuzzFlash interview with Naomi Klein, Author of No Logo and Fences and Windows

Branding, at its core, is this obsession with consistency and comforting images. So if you're a business person, you know that if you stay at a Holiday Inn, no matter where in the world, it's always going to be pretty much the same. But I think that the idea of country branding is actually deeply undemocratic, because the idea is to apply this same logic to come up with the few character traits for an entire people and market them.

What's particularly interesting about the attempts to rebrand the U.S. is that they hired Charlotte Beers, who is one of the most famous advertising executives -- definitely the most famous woman in advertising. She's represented clients like Sears. And Colin Powell's statement on the hiring of Charlotte Beers was, "She got me to eat Uncle Ben's rice."

When they did their focus groups and research about what the American brand stands for, they heard phrases like diversity, democracy, tolerance and so on. And so it's not just branding. But these particular brand attributes are inconsistent with the idea of democracy, because how do you mass market diversity levels? It's very difficult to do that.

I think America is mixed nuts