lead/marke NET: Adrian Ho > "The Corporation Strikes Back"

(lead/marke NET proudly features Adrian's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

Image via: mushon.

I have no direct evidence for this, but I’ve been thinking recently that big companies appear to be coming back into favour after many years of having been dismissed as irrelevant.

• For example, Walmart are now getting lots of recognition and publicity for being green. While it’s clear they’re making a real commitment to helping, it’s largely their scale that has everyone talking, not the intensity of their actions. As a percentage of business, green is far smaller at Walmart than it is at a company like Method that was founded upon green principles, however small actions go a long way at big companies and it’s hard for smaller players to compete.
• In the airline industry, there’s lots of talk around the discussions between United and Continental and the potential for efficiencies that the World’s largest airline could reap. While Southwest and JetBlue were the darlings of Wall Street for years, the last couple of years have shown that even they aren’t immune to financial troubles.
• And in the auto industry BMW, one of the lone independents, has suffered job losses and sales declines while Ford has seen dramatic growth in the US and Europe.

These appear to me to be a contradiction of the axiom that passion could trump scale, that size was no longer a determining factor in success in the Internet economy. Instead, I think our networked world has increased the amount of impact that a large company can have exponentially over the impact of a small company.

For example, in the marketing world, some of the new rules for brands and branding put companies with deep pockets and lots of assets at an advantage. Bigger companies can create a larger number of communities around themselves and they can give their communities more support. This is why I think we’re seeing that companies like Starbucks, Coca Cola and Best Buy are community marketing stars, even though they aren’t brands that ignite the same levels of passion as smaller companies.

Maybe it’s just me, but it also feels that a blanket of pragmatism that has descended upon all aspects of culture which are sharpening this trend. What do you think?

Adrian is founding partner of Zeus Jones a branding company believing actions speak louder than words and that modern brands are defined by what they do not what they say. He speaks (and writes) regularly about non-communications based models for marketing & branding. @adrianho