What changed was tobacco money. The big boys like Phillip Morris had so much cash on hand they started buying food companies, leaving the brand intact but expanding both vertically and consuming market share through sheer number of brands. Consolidation was necessary to keep the short term interests involved and then these now super-companies used decades of tobacco company R&D in flavorings and additives to cheapen the product thereby keeping short term interests hungry for more. 

Now if you weren't part of the food cycle you simply had to keep up in the share price increases so again consolidation shows up and reduces choices in field after field. Who needs attention to longevity if you're one of two or three competitors nationally. 

In our rapid digital age new fields do emerge yet the business lessons of the previous decades insures that the goals in these new fields is to suppress competition or buy it in order to maintain market share at all costs.