Marketspace

Marketspace—an information- and communication-based electronic exchange environment—is a relatively new concept in marketing. Since physical boundaries no longer interfere with buy/sell decisions, the world has grown into several industry specific marketspaces which are integration of marketplaces through sophisticated computer and telecommunication technologies. The term marketspace was introduced by Jeffrey Rayport and John J. Sviokla in 1994 in their article "Managing in the Marketspace" that appeared in Harvard Business Review. In the article the authors distinguished between electronic and conventional markets. In a marketspace, information and/or physical goods are exchanged, and transactions take place through computers and networks. These networks consist of blogs, forum threads, and micro-blogging services like Twitter. Businesses and their customers are enabled to create conversations and two-way communications about products and services. These conversations may also happen outside the sphere of control of a given business, when a marketing campaign or customer-service issue captures the attention of web-savvy consumers.