One of the Most powerful steps a product or brand can take to get an edge on competitors and make more money is to respond to cultural developments in innovative ways. Emerging trends create specific demands. Smart marketers – in virtually any industry – can benefit enormously by satisfying these cravings with creative and engaging offerings.For example, the current global obsession with eco-friendly and carbon-neutral actions emerged only recently, and is poised to grow even larger in the next few years.

As a marketer, it’s your challenge to recognize what is getting attention and devise a strategy. Many companies – even ones in industries you wouldn’t think could organically “benefit” from global-warming mania – are coming up with creative ways to capture consumers’ imaginations.

A dance club in Rotterdam, Holland is marketing itself as the world’s first eco-friendly nightclub. It has a specially sprung floor. As people dance, the floor moves slightly and generates electricity, which reduces the club’s consumption of outside power. A health club in Hong Kong is doing something similar, harnessing human power from cross-training equipment and exercise bikes.

In the often-vilified airline industry, a start-up carrier called Silverjet is requiring passengers to purchase carbon-offset credits for their flights, which they are then invited to “spend” on the eco project of their choice. Airplanes are airplanes, right? But only Silverjet can claim to be carbon-neutral.

Personalization and social networking are other major cultural trends ripe for exploitation.

Nike is among the brands benefiting from embracing the personalization trend. The footwear company invites customers to visit its Web site and “build” personalized sneakers by choosing colors, materials and designs. Similarly, the Web site for M&Ms’s chocolate candies lets visitors personalize sweets with customized colors and messages.

Even banks – normally bastions of conservatism – have jumped on this trend. Garanti, the largest bank in Turkey, is issuing personalized Visa cards created by customers who upload their own images to the bank’s Web site. Garanti went one step further, allowing cardholders to make a few key banking product decisions, including card fees, reward types and interest rates. Card fees, for example, can be pushed back to zero by committing to a monthly spending minimum. This kind of personalization has the added advantage of allowing the bank to test various value propositions in order to better understand what its customers want. And it’s working: GE Consumer Finance has recently taken a significant stake in Garanti, and other banks, including Washington Mutual and ING, are mimicking the Garanti model.

The new San Francisco-based airline Virgin America is an example of a forward-thinking brand that is benefiting from the social-networking phenomenon by incorporating seat-to-seat networking into its seatback entertainment system, allowing passengers to communicate with others on board.

Imagine you’re flying to a conference. It’s likely that there are other passengers you don’t know who are going to the same conference. Now you can interact with them. Impromptu onboard user groups created on the fly can exchange tips about hotels, restaurants, shopping or sightseeing. Bringing social networking into the real world like this is the way of the future.

Understanding trends, and formulating strategies to benefit from them, requires marketers to take a break from their hectic daily lives and look at the big picture of what is happening in the world around them. It’s rare for most of us to have any time to take a step back, look at the direction of culture in general, and determine how it may affect our businesses.

I would challenge you to take another look at your company or clients from your customers’ perspectives. Think about how you could implement creative strategies that embrace green, personalization and social networking. These are just three of dozens of major trends from which most businesses haven’t yet recognized, reacted or profited.