Australia is heartland territory for the anti-corporate crusade by Canadian Naomi Klein, author of the best-selling and cult-forming No Logo, hailed as a manifesto for attacks on globalisation now sweeping the world. Recently Australians have kept McDonald's out of Byron Bay, pushed Sydney Olympics sponsor Coca-Cola to commit globally to more climate-friendly refrigeration, maintained regular Friday night protest vigils outside the Nike store in Melbourne, challenged Starbucks' plans to open in Lygon Street, Carlton, and caused havoc for the World Economic Forum.

Klein's No Logo, subtitled Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, contemplates a future where a new generation of activism fuels "the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high name-brand recognition". Despite the book's global success, Klein remains hazy on the critical question of how the initial anger and anarchy of her "next big" movement will grow into a new, more sustainable and more equitable way of organising to meet society's needs and wants.

Rather than a world with no logos, branding may well be part of the solution, because brands are not good or bad per se. It's the bad things that can happen behind them - sweatshop labour, pollution and dispossession of indigenous peoples to name a few.

From a community-cum-consumer perspective, branding can be just as useful for tagging good corporate performers - helping to distinguish good products and services. The reputations of corporations and their brands are being scrutinised like never before. This is evident in the rapid rise of socially responsible investment. One yardstick of such investment is The Sydney Morning Herald Good Reputation Index which measures leading corporations a gainst social and environmental criteria, as well as financial. Having maximum brand visibility in today's globally connected society and wanting to retain positive impact are compelling business reasons to replace bad behaviour with good, and marketing spin with performance substance. The bigger brands are, the harder they fall.

Nor is branding confined to the corporate world. Greenpeace, Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontieres are top global brands in environmental activism, human rights and health, respectively. Political parties like Labor and Liberal are domestic brands. Australia's No 1 consumer watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, is a brand, as is the conservative Business Council of Australia. Like corporations, each has to manage its brand - promoting it, refreshing it, defending it. Destructive, disrespectful or capricious conduct by a green group, a regulator, a political party or an industry group will undermine it just as surely as it will a commercial brand.

Klein ends No Logo by saying that key players in the growing movement she has identified are at "the early stages of demanding a citizen-centred alternative to the international rule of the brands". Her rhetoric is stirring, almost revolutionary. But the ultimate challenges to the world are profound environmental, health and other crises and human inequity - not too many Coke signs, McDonald's golden arches or Nike swooshes - and the need for brands to be high profile provides the greatest market lever for corporate responsibility.

Activists have recognised the value of brands from a protest perspective. In Britain, Families Against Bush, run by a former Greenpeace campaign director, clearly identifies one US oil giant and its brand as climate change villains, while advocating an arch rival as the place to fill up the tank.

The brand game is played by even the "political outlaws" from the anti-globalisation, anti-corporate campaigns who have followed the protests that closed down the World Trade Organisation (brand name WTO) in Seattle at the end of 1999. They've chosen a very contemporary, mercurial, name-changing marketing style, with S11 for the September 11, 2000 blockade targeting the Davos World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne, and M1 or the globally co-ordinated Labour Day protests on May 1.

Klein credits a growing band of young activists - presumably the authors of the S11, M1 and similar protests - for leading her "next big political movement", and The New York Times sees Klein as the incarnation of her generation's "reinvention of the North American Left". However, recent Australian experience suggests that anti-globalisation sentiment is founded on much more than born-again 1960s-style Leftist protesting.

Paul Sheehan wrote recently in the Herald that the thread linking a growing band of country independents "is outrage at the ascendancy of corporate power in Australian politics, and the belief that rural communities and industries have been sacrificed to globalisation and deregulation".

A surprising outcome from protests in the S11 and M1 style has been that their ill-defined anti-corporate anger resonates in the wider community. The career globalisation champion and BHP chairman, Don Argus, conceded as much recently, telling The Age: "People know what's going on. They really do understand and I think there is a limit to the tolerance of citizens."

The clear challenge for corporations is to make their logos stand for good financial, social and environmental outcomes instead of bad or mixed ones, and for substance not spin.

Corporations and brands that earn the social licence to operate will manage risk better, draw the best people to work with them and gain informed consumer "votes" at the cash register - enhancing their growth prospects and creating competitive advantage.

Klein's next big movement isn't going away, but neither does it yet have the answers. Big brands can become rallying points for constructive collaboration to find answers to the world's problems, rather than being just convenient targets for angry people.