Recently, an article from my Facebook news feed caught my attention. It was a link to a website called PolicyMic. Something about “10 corporations controlling almost everything we buy”… Faced with such a title, I knew the article could go both ways, either an insightful read or the exact opposite, Link to Article. Still, the preview of the article contained the following illustration:Which convinced me to check it out. What amazed me most about this illustration, was that many of the brands portrayed actually were owned by groups, whereas in my mind they were independent firms. Brands such as BOSS, San Pelegrino or even Pringles. What’s also interesting  in this illustration, is to see that all these 10 major groups all follow the same growth strategy at the bigger scale, namely diversifying their portfolio through width and depth of marketing mix (though only the former is depicted in the above illustration).

Further down the article, we see that the trend of big groups owning several brands is not unique to the consumer good industry. As we see here, whether it be the media industry or the banking industry, the same consolidation pattern is visible:

Surprisingly,  the article puts a negative spin on these industry consolidations, by saying for example that the 10 big groups, merely offer us the illusion of choice. Since in the end, almost all products are owned by the same 10 big groups. Still, I don’t see the problem. The fact that these groups grew to become that big, are only proof of their aptitude to do business, and actually are able to do better than the competition. Furthermore, having only the 10 biggest groups left in the industry, pushes them to push competition as crazy in order to improve their individual marketshare, hence making great use of Research and Development to push new products and aggressively compete,  all else equal, leaving us, consumers with the best possible accessibility to the products we want.