How Big Brands Are Not Dying and What It Means About the Decentralized Future

One of the most cited pieces of so-called conventional wisdom in the social media space is that “52% of Fortune 500 companies from 2000 are out of business.”

What’s more, per my pal Ray Wang in his HBR IdeaCast, “If we look at the S&P 500 started in 1960, the average age of a company was 60 years old. It’s projected to be less than 12 years old in terms of an average age of an S&P 500 company by 2025. That’s a 5x compression.”

We all know why…digital disruption, fragmented audiences, e-commerce’s ability to micro-target.

Right?

My own biases certainly confirmed that.

Which brings me to why I was so intrigued by an article called “Are Big Brands Dying?”

It applied a serious degree of academic and intellectual rigor concluding that, in fact, they were not.

Now, it needs to be said all of the brands studied in this article were packaged goods. The authors looked at the top 5 brands in 21 different categories.

The conclusions were, for me at least, somewhat surprising.

• Big/global brands are not declining and small/local brands are not growing.
• Brand loyalty is not declining for big brands
• Young people (aka ‘millenials’) do not increasingly distrust and reject big brands
• Levels of loyalty between small and big brands do not differ significantly
• Small brands do need to advertise
• E-commerce alone isn’t enough (even Amazon has gotten into bricks/mortar via Whole Foods)

The study looked at 4-5 years of data in a category and the paper was published this year, so I wonder if the disruption had already occurred from the early 2000s?

Also, I wonder if retail/packaged goods somehow is less susceptible to disruption.

Regardless, it was a counter-intuitive conclusion from the conventional wisdom (though we still have to reconcile it with the aforementioned data).

In some way, this post is an interesting (maybe incongruous) build on yesterday’s post, but the point is that…even more so than blockchain as simply a technology, it’s critical for us to assess the IMPACT of a given technology on a sector or society.

It’s also critical to consistently challenge conventional wisdom (from the advocates as well as the naysayers).

In a time as turbulent as the Age of Decentralization, the only conventional wisdom I can offer is to be pithy.

It’s going to be very unconventional for a while.