Technology has significantly changed consumers’ lives and is likely to shape the future of business and marketing in particular. As an illustration, changes in technology have afforded marketers with access to consumers and massive amounts of data on patterns of their behaviors that someone has to transform before they can be useful for decision-making. This rapid evolution in technology and its effect on the growth of the complexity of business environments are giving rise to both opportunities and challenges from a marketing perspective, deserving research attention. Therefore, researchers should make an effort to study how organizations can take advantage of these opportunities and face these challenges. In this context, advancing the analysis of nondeterministic marketing problems is imperative.

The distinction between simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic systems provides an excellent context for solving strategic marketing problems. Too often marketing strategies are based on simple and at best complicated systems in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis. When in actual fact marketing operates in complex systems such as markets, where cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, marketers need to embrace this complexity and evolve strategies for dealing better with these challenges. In order to develop effective marketing strategies, we need to better understand the new trends in consumer behavior which could enable companies to adapt and to make better decisions. The main complexity is dealing with the increasing product variety and changing consumer demands, what is forcing marketers to abandon undifferentiated marketing strategies, and even niche marketing strategies, and to adopt a mass customization process interacting one-to-one with their customers. Today, new technologies and new sources of information about consumer behavior are emerging and can help managers to understand this in great detail: Big Data, neuromarketing, interactive communication media, and so forth.

This special issue calls for submissions dealing with these questions. The purpose of this issue is to trigger a substantive discussion on how marketing can face the upcoming technological challenges. We are interested in original and constructive contributions addressing the recent advances of methodological themes as chaos, genetic algorithms, cellular automata, neural networks, and evolutionary game theory in marketing for meeting the new consumer trends. We encourage authors to submit manuscripts that present effective marketing strategies. We also invite papers that substantially improve our understanding of the complexity of marketing in understanding the new consumer.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• New market segmentation techniques (advances in Partial Least Square, FIMIX-PLS, POS-PLS, etc.)
• Marketing in the Big Data Era
• Difficulty in understanding the new consumer by cellular automata
• New ways of consumption in a complex world
• Neural networks for consumer behavior in digital environments
• Neuromarketing and new applications (eye tracking, virtual reality, etc.) in marketing