Joel Rubinson’s blog recently noted the concept of “mental marketplaces.” As opposed to physical markets for a specific product, “mental marketplaces” are all the companies and brands a consumer associates freely with a particular space. This is exceptionally interesting.

So, for example, Rubinson writes that:

“The ‘mental marketplace’ changes the rules of competition; your brand must vie for attention against functionally unrelated brands including celebrities and games like Farmville. For example, Whole Foods vies in the mental marketplace of “wellness” with Dannon, Kashi, Subway even WebMD.”

I am not aware of really good work in this area (it may already exist), but I can anticipate a service that tracks monthly mindshare in these mental marketplaces. This could be done by aggregating several thousand individuals in a representative online panel and asking them to enter their free associations with brands and companies (and possibly individuals and institutions) in a certain set of market spaces. The data could be coded and quantified and mapped using text analytics to show the strongest connections of one player to another.

For example, panelists could be asked to consider what companies, brands, personalities and institutions they associate with “health”, or “style” or “tropical vacations.”

This turns brand tracking on its head as research participants wouldn’t be rating brands, but they would be telling us what brands (“brands” in a wider sense) are filling specific “mental marketplaces” and how much that “brand” is filling this space.

This could be a boon for the creation of unlikely marketing partnerships among business that are related only by their location in the same mindshare space.

Taking Rubinson’s thinking a step further, a tool that reveals the players in a “mental marketplace” could lead to radically new joint marketing efforts and a dynamic feedback loop that only intensifies the non-hierarchical, “two way world” that Rubinson describes.