I read a book called Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari featuring a powerful chapter using Peugeot as an example to explore the reality of what a corporation actually is.

Harari argues that large-scale human cooperation depends on shared fictions – things that don’t physically exist but are collectively believed in.

Peugeot is one of these ‘imagined entities’. It isn’t a tangible object like a car; rather, it’s a legal and social construct. The factory, cars, and employees exist physically, but ‘Peugeot’ as a corporation exists only because people (courts, governments, customers, employees) agree that it does.

I started thinking about the accelerated consolidation happening in our industry and what that means for the collision of differing imagined belief systems.

Imagine Company A is making a big old acquisition of Company B. Company A is 50 years old and sells yellow sweets. It has a yellow logo, 10,000 employees and customers who all love yellow sweets. Company B has been Company A’s biggest competitor for the last 40 years. It sells green sweets, has a green logo, 8,000 employees and a loyal green-sweet-loving customer base.  

Remove the colouring and the sweets are essentially the same. Based on Harari’s theory, everything that both companies believe in revolves around fictional constructs, designed to create identity and differentiation, through colour, brand and culture.

So there’s a choice for Company A to make:

1. Don’t disrupt the fiction – leave each business separate and benefit from both, under a newly-created fiction, ‘The Group’. Perpetuate the competitive spirit and hope board meetings don’t turn into yellow versus green cage fights.

2. Force a single fiction – make all sweets yellow and take 8,000 people on a ‘journey’ to believe an imagined reality that they’ve fought against for years. Call it corporate religious conversion.

3. Merge fictions – mix green and yellow sweets in one bag hoping that customers are happy and don’t realise the only difference for years has been the colour.

4. Create a new fiction – reinvent the sweet, making it black, using new-age technologies to produce a flavour never experienced before. This new technology allows black sweets to be produced and sold with only 9,000 people, mitigating the risk of how many people need to be persuaded to leave behind their old, imagined reality.

Look at recent consolidations. Question which choices are being made. Who’s continuing to sell yellow and green sweets?  Who’s turning all sweets yellow?  Who’s now selling mixed bags?  And who’s changing the sweets forever?

Here’s some food for thought.  Who’s decided to make more lucrative fiction and sell completely different products in the form of a ‘health-conscious’ alternative? It still follows the theme of a consumable treat, so theoretically, as human mouths exist, there is a market.

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