The leadership of corporate America is responding to a large number of important trends shaping business in the 21st century. Their decisions will influence and be influenced by changes in the competitive, political-legal, economic, technological, and social-cultural environments. Marketing ethics and social responsibility will continue to play important roles in business transactions in your hometown and around the globe.
The competitive environment will heat up in the next decade as more companies become veterans of the Web battle. Respondents to a recent survey report that competitive forces will come from every sector of business. A full third of these respondents believe the most serious competition will come from U.S. companies who are not yet a Fortune 500 company. Thirty percent expect foreign marketers to pose the most formidable competitive threat. By a larger than four-to-one majority most CEOs believe that expanding their markets is a more important priority than increasing their share of current markets.
Much of the competition will result from innovations in technology and scientific discoveries. Business in the 21st century will be propelled by information technologies and sustained by creativity and entrepreneurial activity. Biotechnology is an industry in its infancy that is expected to explode in the economy in the next decade. Scientists will be able to create materials atom by atom, replicating much that nature can do and more.
Indeed, the surge of innovation is fueling an expected 3 percent annual growth in the economy that experts predict will last for years to come. This age of prosperity is benefiting more people than just the established elite. By 2010, e-commerce could revolutionize all kinds of industries and account for 6 percent of the gross domestic product. In the 20th-century economy, industrial sectors included retail, financial services, and manufacturing. But today, those old sectors do not fit the networked economy. The idea of what it means to be a retail company will change in five years when a billion people are logged on to the Internet. The bundling of services on the Internet will bypass many of the financial services we take for granted today. For example, when a 14-year-old buys a digital CD off the Internet, digital cash is transferred from her hard drive to that of the recording artist, thereby eliminating the need for a bank or credit-card company. Money will eventually be relegated to encrypted numbers on disk drives and digital wallets.
Dynamic growth cannot be left entirely to self-regulation. Simultaneously, as the information age builds a wealth of information, it has the ability to rob individuals of their privacy. The next decade will produce a plethora of rules and regulations to control the marketing environments. Understandably, businesses are disturbed at having limitations placed on their operations. For example, a broad federal privacy protection law that forces data gatherers to inform consumers that they have collected information on them and explain how the information is being used could cost marketing researchers and businesses billions of dollars in redesigning database configurations to be in compliance with new standards
Consumers will feel the impact of environmental changes in every aspect of their lives. The new century is ushering in new generations of consumers who expect high-quality, low-cost products readily available on demand. Every company will be forced to build relationships to attract and retain loyal customers in order to succeed.
Underlying all the changes in the business environments and marketing mix elements is a requirement for companies to act ethically and in socially responsible ways. Marketers will have to go beyond what is legally right and wrong by integrating ethical behavior in all of their actions. Forward-looking companies will reap the benefits tomorrow of socially responsible behavior today.