The financial crisis experienced by western countries has caused consumption and marketing trends to change quickly.

Now cheaper things, or even more so, free things take priority. And this is happening in more and more sectors. Some examples of these trends are the following:

Communication. SMS (Short Message Service) is being used more and more with mobile phones. The SMS service allows the user to send a message instead of making a call, which means significant savings in communication charges.

On one hand, there's a greater demand for voice calls over web-based calls, which occur as a result of voice waves transmitted over the internet, whose signals arrive in the form of digital packages, rather than sending analog signals. Voice instead of web-based calls are reducing international communication costs and improving communication between service providers and clients as well as within offices of the same group. The primary advantage of this type of service is the reduction in telephone charges (mainly long-distance). The most famous web-based call company is Skype.

On the other hand, land-line phones, before the exponential growth of mobile phones and web-based calling, had been forced to offer special rates, for both domestic calls as well as Internet use (time and bandwidth).

Travels. The significant increase in low-cost airlines. There are Airlines that typically offer low fares in exchange for eliminating many of the traditional passenger services. The characteristics of these airlines are:

Only one passenger class, one fare type (normally the price increases at the rate that tickets are sold, so book the tickets early for the best fares).
Unassigned seats. Passengers sit where they choose, based upon boarding order.
Flights to secondary, cheaper and less congested airports. In this way they avoid delays related to traffic and take advantage of cheaper landing fees.
Short flights that occur often.
Exponential number of direct ticket sales, especially on the Internet, avoiding taxes and commissions from travel agencies.
Employees have multiple roles, for example there are flight attendants that also clean the plane, handle the boarding process, etc., thus, reducing passenger costs.

Store Brands. Theses are brands that are cheaper than the manufacturer's brand and they save money on publicity and advertising. In many cases, the store brand product is identical to the other one, but available at a lower cost.

Vehicles. Low gas consumption and low cost vehicles are the tendency across the world right now. India has launched the cheapest car in the world, called the Tata Nano, for a price of only 1,500 Euros. This year in our country, the government has approved a state subsidy for each person that buys a first-hand car.

CONCLUSION

As a result of the economic crisis and the salary reduction that's on the horizon for western countries, Spain now has a new class of citizens called the "one thousand euro worker" (mileurista), that has to subsist on 1,000 Euros/month to cover the costs of their basic needs (housing, food, transportation, communication, clothing, recreation, culture, etc.). Since it's difficult to adjust the salary of this new social class, it looks like the future will hold a tendency toward cheaper things.

The young "mileuristas", belong to the most-prepared generation in history... about 30 years old, university graduates and they speak other languages, but the low salaries, the over abundance of graduates and social changes have impeded their climb to the top. This new social class shares flats, doesn't own a car or house, and doesn't have children and it has already realized that the future appears more and more complicated every day.