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.

MROC Variant 1 is what we think of as a traditional MROC built exclusively (usually by Communispace, Passenger, etc.) for a client with the members coming exclusively from the client’s current customer base (raving fans typically).

MROC Variant 2 is (will be) MROCs built around particular affinity groups and consumer types and accessed like an omnibus product by many different marketers. In this case the MROC or panel company will “rent” access to the group to many buyers.

MROC Variant 3 is (will be) like lockerz or expotv .

It will be a much larger type of MROC which we might label as something else entirely – possibly a OECLS (Open Ended Customer Listening Service) or a “megapanel.”

Several things will distinguish variant 3:

1. Size. These online communities could be huge.
2. Ownership. They may not be owned by traditional MR players.
3. Multiple Interests. They are likely to include members with many different interests.
4. Fun. They will be more fun than a traditional MROC and will force Variant 1 to build in games and other attractions.

Where does Variant 3 end up? One possible future is a global “cool” community operating by member invitation only that enables trendspotters to identify the most bleeding edge trends in fashion, entertainment and consumption in real time. Members would post videos of their newest purchases and offer dreamscapes on what they want to do with friends or family in the summer. Who knows, they might even discover the catchy tunes of LatinoArabia music.

But, it is usually done by a small team or gifted seer with a “finger on the pulse” (like Cayce Pollard in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition), but one company is turning that paradigm on its head by apparently creating a large trendspotting network.

For more on this, click here.

Its the distributed “cool hunter” phyle.