Invest in brands - they are the assets of the future. This is the received wisdom. It is argued that we are all increasingly pressured, with more of us working longer and so we need ways to decide our purchases quickly and easily. We will turn to companies and brands we trust.

Boots will not just be a chemist, it will also provide us with dental services - as it already provides optical services - and will probably provide health care as well. Internet suppliers such as Amazon.com are spending fortunes to establish their brands. Increasingly fewer suppliers will provide standard products and services and make life easy for us - just as Microsoft does in software and McDonalds and Coca-Cola in food and drink. You know exactly what you're going to get, it's available everywhere, and is highly reliable - or so the theory goes.

This is a seductive picture, building on trends that we can recognise even if we deplore them. We know some global brands already exist, and we can observe the huge marketing to maintain their presence.

As the media industry too is globalised, surely the pressure behind the big brands will intensify and smaller brands and companies will be squeezed out. Unilever is already rationalising its brand lines - selling the smaller brands which it thinks will not survive and which are not worth the advertising support. Oil of Ulay has become Oil of Olay to standardise the name worldwide, with useful travelling sachets widely distributed in support of the name change. Opal Fruits are now Starburst - if you haven't realised all this already, the campaigns have obviously passed you by.

Big business will thus get bigger, and our tastes will be managed to fit in. Our busy lives will give less and less time for searching for alternatives and the biggest advertising budget will win.

But seller beware - there are inconsistencies in this seductive or nightmarish story, depending on whether you are a marketing manager or an unreconstructed consumer.

First, the pressure on time is really a fiction. We may be working longer than a few years ago and more than in the rest of Europe, but compared to the past there are oceans of leisure. Annual working hours have halved compared to a century ago, and are down 25% on 1950. On top of which labour-saving devices in the home make keeping a house a doddle compared with a generation ago.

So there's plenty of leisure, and indeed the leisure industry is here to prove it - holiday companies, health clubs, restaurants and wine bars are all successful businesses because now we are both leisured and wealthy.

For not only are we working less than before, we also have more money to spend. It is estimated that the average household is worth £72,000. Our problem is not time, or even money - it is what to do with it. We are spoilt for choice.

When there is only enough money to get by and waking hours are largely spent working, there is no choice; it is enough simply to keep going. Many people in Britain can remember such times. When there are lots of options, many of them pleasurable and most heavily advertised, then the problem appears to be how to fit them all in - and suddenly time is scarce.

So the busy lives the brand managers predict for us are in fact created by them - they want to simplify our choices so our time is filled by their products and services rather than anyone else's. If choice is what makes us feel unhappy, stressed and pressured, then this should be a good thing. In a world of overabundance, limitation of choice becomes a good in itself. If religion does not provide this, brands will.

So it appears to be up to us. If choice is too much for us, we'll lose it, and the risk for the brand managers is that they assume that we don't really want choice.

But there is a more powerful force than advertising or customer databases - it is called word of mouth. A film can become a cult success because people tell their friends about it. You can choose one internet provider over another because someone you like tells you its OK. You can decide not to buy, not to take a particular holiday, as a result of talking to your friends and relations. This process can be understood but can't be predicted with any degree of certainty.

It will continue to undermine brands in all kinds of subtle ways - and means that we may well continue to be spoilt for choice.

Bridget Rosewell is chairman of Volterra Consulting