Marketing Review — Summer 2008 - (Page 42) By 2015, improved technologies and concerns about the long-term cost of energy will lead even the rail-resistant United States to begin modernizing its train system. New aircraft navigation and safety technologies will reduce the number and severity of crashes. 37) The pace of technological change accelerates with each new generation of discoveries and applications. IMPLICATIONS FOR HOSPITALITY AND TRAVEL: Continued growth of the Internet will continue to bring these industries the same benefits others enjoy—lower business expenses, greater efficiency, and easier access to customers even for the smallest operators. Online marketing will grow even more significant for destinations as China and India grow more prosperous and travel-prone. Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are one of the hottest online phenomena of recent years. Now hospitality and travel firms are getting into the act. KLM, one of the earliest adopters and still among the most impressive, offers its customers three invitation-only communities where they can meet like-minded colleagues, one for people doing business in 55 TRENDS FOR TRAVEL & HOSPITALITY • SUMMER 2008 42 200127641-001/CHRISTOPH WILHELM/GETTY IMAGES In fast-moving engineering disciplines, half of the cutting-edge knowledge learned by college students in their freshman year is obsolete by the time they graduate. The design and marketing cycle—idea, invention, innovation, imitation—is shrinking steadily. As late as the 1940s, the product cycle stretched to 30 or 40 years. Today, it seldom lasts 30 or 40 weeks. Almost any new consumer product can be exactly duplicated by Chinese factories and sold on e-Bay within a week after it is introduced. The reason is simple: Some 80 percent of the scientists, engineers, technicians, and physicians who ever lived are alive today—and exchanging ideas real time on the Internet. ASSESSMENT: This trend will continue for many years. However, we may grow less able to perceive it. IMPLICATIONS: Subjectively, change soon will move so rapidly that we can no longer recognize its acceleration, save as an abstract concept. All the technical knowledge we work with today will represent only 1 percent of the knowledge that will be available in 2050. Industries will face much tighter competition based on new technologies. Those who adopt state-of-the-art methods first will prosper. Those who ignore them will eventually fail. Products must capture their market quickly, before the competition can copy them. Brand names associated with quality are becoming even more important in this highly competitive environment. Lifelong learning is a necessity for anyone who works in a technical field—and for growing numbers who do not. In what passes for the long run—a generation or two—the development of true artificial intelligence is likely to reduce human beings to managers. Rather than making new discoveries and creating new products, we will struggle to understand and guide the flow of novelties delivered by creations we cannot really keep up with. IMPLICATIONS FOR HOSPITALITY AND TRAVEL: As new technologies arrive, hospitality and travel operators will be forced to hire more technology specialists and train other employees to cope with new demands. The next major development will be the spread of RFID chips throughout the hospitality and travel industry. Airlines, hotels, and restaurant chains all will need to hire technicians with experience in RFID to set up and monitor new, automated inventory and ordering systems, while everyone from chefs to warehouse personnel will need training in their use. 38 7 38) The Internet continues to grow, but at a slower pace. In mid-2007, Internet users numbered about 1.173 billion, up just less than one-fourth in three years. Most growth of the Internet population is now taking place outside the United States, which is home to only 19 percent of Internet users. In mid-2007, the most recent available data showed 162 million Internet users in China (12.3 percent of the population), 42 million in India (3.7 percent), and 86.3 million in Japan (67.1 percent.) The growth of e-commerce also is slowing, with 2007 sales estimated at $116 billion sales growth, as much as 25 percent per year in 2004, is expected to slow to 9 percent annually by 2010. ASSESSMENT: Internet growth will continue until essentially no one in the world lacks easy access to e-mail and the Web, about 30 years by our best estimate. IMPLICATIONS: Americans will continue to dominate the Internet so long as they produce a substantial majority of Web pages—but that is not likely to be very long. Analysts believe that Internet growth will not accelerate again until broadband service becomes less expensive and more widely available. This is a matter of government policy as much as of technology or basic costs. Demands that the United States relinquish control of the Internet to an international body can only gain broader support and grow more emphatic as Americans make up a smaller part of the Internet population. B2B sales on the Internet are dramatically reducing business expenses throughout the Internet-connected world, while giving suppliers access to customers they could never have reached by traditional means. The Internet has made it much easier and cheaper to set up a profitable business. An online marketing site can be set up with just a few minutes’ work at a cost of much less than $100. This is fostering a new generation of entrepreneurs. Internet-based outsourcing to other countries has only just begun. Growth in this field will accelerate again as overseas service firms polish their English, French, and German and find even more business functions they can take on. Cultural, political, and social isolation has become almost impossible for countries interested in economic development. Even China’s attempts to filter the Internet and shield its population from outside influences have been undermined by hackers elsewhere, who provide ways to penetrate the barriers.
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.