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The domination of several super companies over the entire world is something that would surely have made Karl Marx cry. Nestle is now the biggest food company in the world, with its consolidated sales being 107.6 billion CHF. They are rivalled only by the likes of Pepsi and Mars Incorporated. Nestle owns almost 8,000 brands from Cookie Crips cereal to Go Cat pet food, as well as Rolos, Fruit gums and Walnut Whip. With the world now being dominated by a mere handful of elite parent companies, it is hard to see how a mere mortal brand can survive. Even our independent shops stock the child brands of these parent companies, your local newsagent will be displaying their finest selection of Aeros, Chunkys, Munchies, Toffee Crisps and Milky Bars to tempt you at lunch time, as well as Nesquik and Juicy Juice in case you are thirsty, and these are only Nestle! You would be hard pushed to go on a detox of this Swiss brand, let alone a complete super-brand boycott. Even the likes of Marks and Spencer and Aldi stock the capitalising giants beside their independent brands because, let’s face it, they sell. And the reason they sell is because they are the most recognisable and favourited on earth due to the huge advertising, marketing and branding budgets their parent companies are able to offer them, which are available because they sell so well. However, all of these market giants started small, as independent companies like those they are overshadowing today. They will have worked very hard to reach such a status that can be likened to world domination, and it is not as if people are buying their products through force, they are popular in their own right. Technologies that are now here to help such a climb in the international market, such as consolidation software, revenue planning and visual analytics, have all been designed to optimise a businesses’ spending in order to maximise profits. These only came about because of the ambitious companies’ successes that had made a market for them. The consolidation of companies monopolises the economy, but as Marx said, this is the natural conclusion of capitalism: to grow and grow upon itself, following mankind’s instinctive desire to constantly improve one’s self. Smaller independent companies do this too, perhaps not on the same scale, but even by wishing to improve their customer service, or re-paint their outside sign to improve the appearance of their shop, they are doing it to bring in more custom and, therefore, make more profit. In other words, they are all following the same money-making philosophy. So it is easy to instantly dismiss the greedy gamblings of industrial monsters, but even the smaller, independent shops are exercising the same traits. It was a lot harder for the two independent Swiss enterprises to come together in the foundation of Nestle, and then go on to establish its world domination in the nineteenth century than it would be for such progress today. Technologies have vastly improved the retail and consumerist markets so that it could even be considered hypocritical to criticise the established big brands of today, as these small companies could reach that stage much quicker along a path already paved for them.
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