Ecosystems of the Future: Marketing and the Consumer Business Environment. Resources and the New Reality of Their Use

Abstract

The article considers the current aspects of needs satisfaction in the context of the development of two strong trends: digitalization of the process of choosing and purchasing of goods and services and the emergence of the society from the state of self-isolation during COVID-19 pandemic. The key problem of the study is the global changes in consumption ecosystems that are caused by technical, organizational and institutional factors that affect marketing, society’s economic resources and the development potential of new and emerging markets of e-commerce and online sales. According to the results of the literature review, it was noted that traditional material consumption is replaced by symbolic, the satisfaction of basic needs is replaced by the need to belong to a social group or corporate brand culture, usually global and controlled by a major global transnational corporations and transnational banks. For the most part, all modern social media and business models, based on Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, operate on the need to impose their vision of happiness on the user through the possession of a certain set of goods or services. The authors, based on the methodological apparatus of behavioral economics, highlight the irrational link in consumption, viewing it as a psychological deviation from normal economic behavior. The COVID-19 pandemic has only increased the suggestibility of focus groups and the ability to externally control them through sophisticated mechanisms of information manipulation. In this study, the authors highlighted new consumption habits and the most frequent patterns of buyer’s behavior. Conclusions are drawn about the formation of new social classes due to the fact that some users live only in online, virtual world instead of the material one, and the need to introduce sustainable and moderately rational consumption. This problem is as acute as the problems of nature management and ecology, because marketing and consumerism, even if they exist only in the virtual world, are impossible without a material basis.