Marketing teams are expanding their use of mobile across functional, geographic, and brand boundaries, and the mobile vendor ecosystem is still fragmented and increasingly convoluted. The result? Marketing leaders are unsure about how to organize and support their growing mobile initiatives — they’re not even certain what responsibilities and talents they should allocate to mobile.

While CMOs are the primary leaders of mobile strategy among C-Suite executives, there’s rarely one clear mobile leader simply because mobile is not solely the domain of marketers. A third of marketers we interviewed still lack CMO support. While executives consider mobile as strategic, only 35% of marketers we surveyed consider they have the budget they need to support their initiatives. More often than not, we have found that marketing leaders lack mobile skills and ways to coordinate mobile across the company.

To help marketing leaders figure out the impact of mobile on their organizations, we have just updated our “Organize For Mobile Marketing Success” report.

Looking down the road, the widespread adoption of mobile technologies will deliver unprecedented levels of change for marketing leaders and their teams as:

  • Agile approaches to marketing will become standard. To embrace the velocity and agility required to reap the benefits of the mobile world, marketing leaders will need to transform their teams’ organization and processes. Mobile’s data granularity and velocity will drive the need to constantly iterate marketing campaigns and tactics.
  • The mobile mind shift moves inside your company. Even companies that are successful with their mobile approach admit that their main challenge is to evolve the company’s culture and make every employee aware of the implications of the mobile mind shift in their daily work life. Human resources departments will increasingly leverage mobile as a way to develop a culture of innovation, acquire the best talents, and transform the entire organization.
  • “Mobile natives” will supplant “digital natives” as the key audience group. Bearing in mind that the first iPhone was released in 2007 and that, on average, most children receive their first mobile phone by the time they turn 11, we have yet to see how mobile will change the habits of an entire generation that will enter the workforce, for the most part, in 2025. Marketers in the future will need to cope with high multitasking levels, extremely short attention spans, “flash” social trends, and the ultimate challenge of marketing to personal digital assistants and new mobile touchpoints that will be mainstream by then.