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And the growth of Small
In the emotional vacuum created by this cultural distrust of Big has come, unsurprisingly, the renewed romance around Small. The touchstone of the craft movement is of course that it is the ideological opposite of Big Beer: the product (we are invited to believe) has been made
with love by real people for the pleasure of its drinkers, rather than financially engineered for
the efficiency of the corporation and the primacy
of the shareholder return. Startups – and is there any college leaver today without half a startup idea? – combine ideology, product, and opportunity in their founding story to attract investor and consumer alike. These are all, of course, simply different narratives that are only part of a larger truth: most startups secretly dream of being a unicorn, just as most craft beer owners want an ultimately comfortable life. But that’s the power
of a strong narrative – by focusing our attention on a compelling part of a larger whole, it changes the way we respond to everything about it.
And so accompanying the growth of the Dominators has also come the increasing success of Small – or Smaller, to be more accurate. A BCG study in 2017 showed US$22bn of value had moved from bigger brands to smaller challengers in US packaged goods over a preceding five year period, with a similar pattern in Europe. These challengers’ growth came, the analysis suggested, from a combination of delivering against underserved needs, using outsourcing to ‘rent’ scale, and the ability to exploit
6 Introduction