Page 5 - Overthrow_Black&WhiteVersion

The opportunity for challengers in a world of Big
Introduction
The spotlight on Big
It is easy to understand the media attention
on Big. In GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook
and Amazon) and BAT (the Chinese equivalent
– Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) we’ve seen the extraordinary growth in a decade of a handful
of brands that have become so all-conquering as
to have transformed our personal and social habits globally, made long-established legacy institutions and cultures – from the US mall to the Swiss watch business – increasingly irrelevant, and created the first trillion dollar company. While these Dominators are primarily digital tech brands, this shift to ever greater size runs across the business world today, from 6,000-year-old categories like beer (AB InBev now has 400 brands and a revenue of US$50bn) to the more recently invented mac ’n’ cheese (consider the recently merged Kraft Heinz bid for the significantly larger Unilever only two years later).
4 Introduction