Introduction: Location and Marketspaces
Two well- worn clichés in politics and real estate now readily apply to business strategy and marketing: “location, location, location,” and “all politics is local.”  Add a line from Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street, “information is the most valuable resource I know,” to our previously mentioned quotes about location, and a business person can weave a powerful recipe to dominate markets.  Even more importantly, any business or organization can provide products and services which delight customers, and get them to evangelize about their experience.  This tidal wave of excitement influences people to buy your products and services even more than the best and most effective marketing campaign.  And as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his seminal book, “The Tipping Point,” this enthusiasm propels an avalanche of positive influence in which consumers actively seek your products and services.  This energy is accessed and released through the proper use of information which focuses on what is happening in a given area.  For the sake of this article, our major focus will be on geographic locations, but we will also examine different types of areas based on other factors – let’s call them marketspaces.

Why A Marketspace Is Important
First, a marketspace is an area designated by a common parameter or set of parameters.  All the people in a marketspace have something in common.  That commonality is dictated by one or more of several factors.  These major categories include geography or locale, which will be examined more extensively shortly, and demographics, socio-economics, type of usage of a product, and ethnicity.  It is very powerful to combine multiple factors to create focus and marketspaces which are unique, and where your business has a competitive advantage to dominate this space.  It’s about creating spaces which best suit and exploit your product or services’ features and benefits.  An executive needs to create “match-ups” against competitors in marketspaces which cater to his products or services’ strengths.  In this sense, Michael Porter’s idea of “competitive advantage” in his widely read business book, "Competitive Strategy," is relevant.  However, I advocate the idea of occupying areas in markets and creating new marketspace through understanding the information about that space in terms of current and latent customer utility.  Latent customer utility is critical, and can be tapped through new features and benefits of a business’s products or services – this is where “Blue Oceans” are created.


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Mike Bolden marketing expert and blue ocean strategist - writing to inform, enlighten, and inspire.  Author of forth coming book, "Owning Marketspace".  Available for consulting and speaking engagements.