How do we define media-marketspace and its convergence with the experience of customers?

Sellers deliver their goods or offer their services at various points in the market. Sellers push a variety of marketing messages through various communication channels and outlets to prospective buyers. Unbeknownst to many sellers, buyers make no meaningful distinction between the product and its marketing messages. Instead, buyers organize the contents of their market experience—brands—within an experiential framework that we call a brandspace. Moreover, the brandspace has a number of intermediaries that may support or challenge the seller’s messaging or offerings.

Media and Markets Converge into an Integrated Brandspace

The figure above depicts how customers collapse their experience of buying and using a product or service and their experience of sellers’ marketing messages, creating three rings of trust within what we call brandspace.

Mediaspace/Marketspace
Mediaspace describes the various ways by which a brand producer communicates with and builds trusted relationships with buyers, including broadcast, print, and offline digital media such as CD-ROM or DVD.
Marketspace describes the area in which buyers meet points of market presence (retail venues, catalogs, field sales calls, workshops or seminars, trade shows, etc.), where buyers take possession of goods and services. A marketspace also includes the value chain of companies or functions that serves the purpose of logistics and fulfillment of goods and services, including warehouses, call centers, shipping companies, and repair depots.

Brand managers have always grappled with coordinating the messages they send through mediaspace with the movement of goods and services to the points of market presence in the marketspace. A serious problem arises if they drive brand messages to market and do not have sufficient inventory for sale. This produces unhappy customers and opportunistic sales for competitors. Unless you have an exclusive good or service that customers cannot substitute (“I’ve got to have Pokémon”), failure to coordinate activity in supply chain logistics and the mediaspace leads to disaster.

Prior to the Networked Economy, the mediaspace and marketspace constituted two separate and two relatively independent domains. But mediaspace and marketspace now converge, collapsing into what we call eMediaspace—where brand storytelling and transactions occur simultaneously. In the Networked Economy, tightly synchronizing the cycle time—the flow of brand storytelling and the flow of digital goods and services—becomes critical to the success of the brand.