Sometimes a company's advertising or marketing gimmick amounts to little more than a variation of the statement, "We're big."

Consider the origins of the airlines' frequent flyer programs. What is the ultimate point of such programs, other than to induce customers to base their flight choices on a factor outside the traditional marketplace considerations of price, convenience, and quality of service? And which competitors are able to offer frequent flyer programs with a reasonable chance of enticing customers: those that fly limited regional routes (say, the eastern half of the Great Lakes basin), or those that fly pretty much everywhere?

Even in industries where corporate size cannot be marketed quite so directly, the effects are more or less the same.

Again, who but large and established companies can afford to pay the retailers' slotting fees, hire the top cognitive manipulators (packaging consultants, ad agencies, etc.), and buy the requisite amounts of media time to compete in today's environment?

Again, too, the situation would be different if we could make reasonable evaluations of the things we buy. But since we cannot--no matter whether we are claiming in marketing tests that the same orange juice tastes better when it comes out of a brighter orange container, or trying to make sense out of media reports about a car's “sudden acceleration”—we ultimately fuel a drive toward corporate gigantism.

Just as the Ice Age's plunging temperatures steered the evolution of mammals toward greater and greater body mass to retain heat, so today's product complexity, and the resultant inability of consumers to objectively evaluate and compare products, shapes the evolution of corporations toward greater and greater organizational and financial heft, based on the need to "pay to play" in the contemporary cognitive marketplace.

Unfortunately, virtually all large organizations are prone to certain inefficiencies. And with only other large organizations to compete with, a considerable amount of overall nonproductiveness is allowed to get by.

Ultimately, the competition begins to look less like a horse race than a fat man's race--i.e., it is not so much a matter of who is faster, as it is of who is less slow.