Future

Marketing is heavily influenced by consumer habits and what they deem acceptable behavior by businesses, which is likely to change drastically both in the short term and again a half decade from now. Our current economic depression is likely over and can be seen as consumer spending is up but the issue of utilizing our limited resources remains a challenge. Business will have to find new ways to cope with changing consumer habits and environmental limitation.

Predictions made by many futurist including William Halal speculate that the world economy will peak around the year 2015, as the need for various factors, including renewable energy, will out weight our current economic and social systems forcing the world into a new direction. These predictions are based off historic economic cycles lasting roughly 35 years, which puts our era of Reaganomics behind us around 2015. Although this is not an exact estimate it is certain that “the 2008 financial crisis … is widely understood to mark an end of to that era” (Halal, 2010). Trends among developing countries, such as China and Brazil, moving toward computers and other common Western technologies give a brief glimpse into the new global economy to come.

For centuries we have taught our young that education and success depends mainly on their ability to regurgitate information lectured to them with little emphasis placed on creativity of innovative practices. This has led to many corrupt business practices, such as complex European banking system or the more recent housing bust, that give enormous amounts of wealth to a select few while largely ignoring the rest. This model has become obsolete as the world enters what is known as the knowledge age, placing emphasis on creating tangi...

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...eb-site interaction has increased as social media becomes more important to the masses and is integrated into other applications. This was done successfully at online music supplier Spotify as they give users the ability to share playlist, individual songs, see what others are playing, and even discover new music. This integration into social media has become widely successful with an increasing number of companies opting to do so.

Connecting back to Aguilar-Millan, Feeney, & Rudd’s article on the post-scarce world prices for theses online goods will continue to drop and the manufacturing costs become lower and lower. Efficiency will be the main contributing factor to this, as we live in a world with limited resources, and will compose a future where online products are significantly cheaper than their in store counterparts (Aguilar-Millan, Feeney, & Rudd, 2010).