If seeking out the products of smaller and more local companies were to become a signficant consumer trend, large corporations might well find ways to present themselves as if they were smaller and more local.

For example, they could borrow a page from the dairy colossus Carnation, which, after determining that American consumers did not believe high-quality ice cream could come from a domestic corporate entity, simply created a new division with the more acceptably foreign-sounding (but entirely invented) name of Haagen-Dazs.

Or perhaps they might imitate today’s massive publishing conglomerates, which keep a variety of traditional imprints alive as operating divisions even after they have swallowed them all up, and thus perpetuate an illusion of an industry with far more healthy diversity than it really has.