Defining and conceptualizing the Digitally-Mediated Collaboration Experience (DMCE): Preliminary Findings and Future Research Directions[Définition et conceptualisation de l'expérience de collaboration assistée par le numérique (DMCE) : résultats préliminaires et voies futures de la recherche]

Collaboration is fundamental to social marketing, yet its study remains fragmented between two largely disconnected perspectives. A functional, objective perspective examines collaboration through governance structures, coordination protocols, task sequences, and resource allocation. A subjective perspective, still emergent, acknowledges that collaborators develop perceptions, emotions, relational dynamics, and symbolic meanings throughout the collaborative process. These two bodies of literature rarely speak to each other, leaving researchers without a unified framework capable of capturing collaboration both as an organized activity and as a lived, meaningful experience. This research proposes experience marketing as the integrative lens to bridge this divide. Drawing on the rich tradition of experience research in marketing—which has long demonstrated that phenomena such as consumption, branding, and service encounters are simultaneously functional realities and subjective, multidimensional experiences—we introduce "digital collaboration experience" as a unifying concept. It is defined as the holistic, subjective, and dynamic lived phenomenon emerging as individuals engage cognitively, emotionally, relationally, behaviorally, and symbolically in technology-mediated collaborative activities directed toward a shared objective. An extensive literature review crossing the fields of collaboration and experience marketing, combined with a qualitative study comprising 18 in-depth semi-structured interviews and 7 direct non-participant observations of digitally mediated collaboration sessions, produced a comprehensive conceptual framework. Findings reveal five interrelated dimensions—cognitive, affective, relational, behavioral, and symbolic—alongside facilitating factors, barriers, and cascading outcomes. A conceptual delimitation exercise, mobilizing Dumez's (2011) conceptual triangle and Gerring's (1999) evaluative criteria, establishes the distinctiveness of digital collaboration experience relative to adjacent constructs (co-creation experience, online community experience, user experience). This work contributes to social marketing by demonstrating that experience marketing provides the theoretical apparatus needed to reconcile functional and subjective accounts of collaboration within a single, empirically grounded framework. It offers researchers and practitioners diagnostic lenses for understanding why structurally sound partnerships may nevertheless fail—when experiential dimensions such as emotional exhaustion, relational opacity, or symbolic misalignment remain unaddressed.