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Delineate the strategic implications for three new marketing trends based on digital technology.

The author looks at how strategy is being affected by: Marketing automation, where artificial intelligence is used to help win a customer and optimize the search for such potential prospects. Social media, which blends the personal and the businesslike and provides opportunities for engagement with the client on an almost real-time, personalized basis. The manipulation of huge quantities of “Big Data” to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing automation and of deriving value from social media.

Under all emerging digital technology scenarios, the marketer’s job becomes more complex and more central to the interaction between the customers and the corporation.

Social marketing will increasingly involve co-creation of product and brand story with customers, experienced-based marketing and more sophisticated management of the interface between the social media platform and automated marketing.

This article identifies the integral relationship between advances in marketing technology and strategic opportunities for marketing innovation.

Maor Zlotzever, a 32-year-old Israeli entrepreneur, was inspired to devote himself to his startup, Axios, by a youthful dream of giving customers genuine value that will improve lives.

This case looks at an entrepreneurial non-profit innovator diversifying into the hydroponics market.

Maor began working on the development of Axios’ hydroponics division as a way to maximize the production capacity of facilities for growing food plants without soil. He and his team designed a simple modular system that requires no computer and can be adapted to use solar power or biogas to drive the hydroponics pump and be energy-neutral. The compact system will sell for much less than competitors’ devices and requires very little “hands on” adjustment while the vegetables are growing.

Maor learned several lessons through his efforts to obtain resources for his project: organizations that position themselves as promoters of the entrepreneurial community often were not inclined to devote resources to idealistic inventions. In contrast, large, supposedly less entrepreneurial organizations like the Ministry of Education, Haifa University and the Israel Institute of Technology, as well as reformist groups like the green organizations, offered support, aid and encouragement.

As Steve Jobs said, “People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

In theory, financial success follows continuous innovation to provide unique value to customers. So far an entrepreneurial innovator intent on doing good by giving customers genuine value that will improve lives is learning to succeed.

American business models have been used as levers to open many industries in Japan to participation by foreign firms, from toy retailing to fast food restaurants and from consumer banking to direct selling of computers. This case describes the efforts of All Nations Society to apply an American approach to outsourcing, pricing, and service bundling in the very traditional industry of funeral services so as to create a competitive advantage for itself against companies that practice opaque pricing and have high overheads.