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With this growth and success, though, another
kind of media commentary has simultaneously developed around Big, particularly in the West:
an increasing suspicion of the power and motive that accompanies it. Simply putting the word Big
in front of a category descriptor – Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Tech – has come, through repeated media headlines, to trigger a common emotional response from us: a sense of cynical giants putting their commercial interests before their customers’ real needs, with a different moral compass to our own, ignoring their social responsibilities in pursuit of growth and preserving the status quo. A business power that grows in spite, rather than a business power that grows because. Try putting ‘Big’ in front of a category it has never been directly associated with before, and see how it changes its meaning
for us: take the relatively neutral concept of football, for instance (the global game – what the US would call soccer). If we read the new phrase ‘Big Football’, what associations come to mind? Probably the same for all of us – the word Big acts as a lightning rod to all the negative headlines around the category: the commercial greed of the big clubs and their owners, the corruption of the governing body FIFA, the sacrifice of the ideals and spirit
of what the fans love on the altar of growth and profit at all costs. And, above all, the perception of an unwelcome widening distance between the business (and its owners) and the people and society that it was once set up to serve. Who was the super-villain, after all, in 2014’s The Lego Movie? Lord Business.
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