Its been a while Google seem to be giving lot of credit to big name brands. Now that they can appear on SERP top 10 without much effort, its also pushing down small guys. Question is, is it a fair policy doing it this way?
big brands are not big all of a sudden. They put much money and effort to build big brands. Put 1/10 of that work/effort on your site and you'll get better results in G, I'm sure.
Big brands have a lot of trusted links too, from traditional media sites that smaller companies struggle to replicate. I'm not sure it's a good thing however - smaller companies often can't afford to compete on Adwords, so it's even harder if they can no longer compete in the natural results too.