Imagine 1950s America. A family is gathered around a television watching one of three broadcast networks. Someone far away decided what that family watched and when they watched it. Big brands dominated the advertising in between the scarce media programming. There was no remote and no way to fast-forward through commercials. This was a time that seems stunningly removed from the present day.

Today, no one gathers around anything: instead media gather around us. Indeed, as we live our lives, we are immersed in media—mobile devices, touch screens in taxis, check-in Kiosks at airport. Media is no longer scarce as it was in the 1950s. Consumer demand—our time, attention, and purchasing power— is the new scarce resource in the economy. To access us, consumers, the world’s most clever companies and marketers have learned to see our lives not media as the ultimate medium of marketing.

In The Future of Marketing, Jeffrey Rayport argues that the marketing framework of the “Four P’s”—Product, Price, Promotion, and Place (distribution)—originally conceived in the early 1960s and still taught in business schools, is no longer as relevant as it used to be. Our demand-scarce world demands insight into when consumers will welcome information about products or services in their lives. Marketing is no longer about figuring out where and when consumers are available to receive brand messages. In a customer-centric world, marketers must become, by definition, invited guests in a domain “owned” and controlled by their customers.

Rayport argues that leaders and marketers must consider that consumers live their lives and experience the world in four spheres: (1) the public sphere, where they move from one place or activity to another, whether physically or online;(2) the social sphere, where they interact with people familiar and unfamiliar to them; (3) the tribal sphere, where they affiliate with groups (families, clubs, companies) to express or define their identity and status; and finally, (4) the psychological sphere, where they generate the thoughts and feelings, words and phrases, that take shape in their minds.

For companies struggling to reach customers in a demand-scarce world, deploying programs and campaigns that map to these spheres will unlock scarce consumer time, attention, and purchasing power.