The mobile landscape is changing rapidly. If you haven't already scheduled a meeting to talk about your brand's utility with your marketing stakeholders, do it now.

Until recently, whenever a client or a prospect asked me about mobile, my cautionary response included an assertion that holds true today: "I've shot down waaaay more mobile proposals than I've recommended to clients."

The U.S. mobile market has been so fragmented that advertising drive-to-web initiatives on mobile devices was a waste of time. Lots of things contributed to mobile's inefficiency – fragmented markets, devices that were woefully inconsistent when it came to features, lack of standards for the mobile web. I could fill the rest of this column with the reasons why it didn't work.

These days, though, if you're a brand manager, you need to keep an eye on the emerging mobile marketing platforms. They're threatening to come together into a discrete marketing opportunity. There are three players worth talking about right now: Research in Motion (BlackBerry), Apple (iPhone) and Google (Android).

"BlackBerry?" you might be thinking. "They're entrenched in the business market."

Yes, that's how they attacked the market in the beginning. However, they're creeping over into the consumer market. Lots of business users see their BlackBerry as a personal device in addition to a business device. And there are a lot of loyalists buying BlackBerrys for personal use. How else would you account for the fact that there's a Facebook for BlackBerry application that has nearly 1.5 million active users?

Apple's iPhone went the other way with it, starting out in the consumer market and creeping into the business market. Goldman Sachs surveyed IT executives in the early summer and found out that 17 percent of them were going to support the iPhone 3G in the next year. (At Underscore, we'll be giving up our beloved BlackBerrys in favor of iPhones in just a week or two.)

The first phones running Google's Android operating system are coming out now. The appeal of the platform is that it's open and not device-specific like Apple's. Dozens of devices from a variety of device manufacturers will run Android. The openness of the platform is what many are hoping will drive its adoption.

What's the common thread among all three?

1. The consumer and business markets are merged. These devices are as likely to find favor with your 13-year-old daughter as they are to be accepted by your corporate IT guy. Whether the device will be used for business purposes or personal (or a hybrid of the two) is largely dependent on which applications the user installs on it.
   
   
2. All are application platforms. This is the bigger of the two takeaways. I see a market emerging where brands can develop a branded application, make some minor tweaks for each of the three platforms, and deploy a comprehensive mobile marketing campaign that hits a majority of the U.S. market.

What these two common threads point to is a platform for functional utility, not straight messaging. People don't want to have messages pushed at them. They want applications they can make use of. And if those applications happen to be branded, they'll be able to consistently keep the brand top of mind with the user as long as the application remains useful.

Brand managers need to be thinking about how they can extend functionality to mobile users through a branded application. I've mentioned this approach before when talking about widgets and gadgets. 

And that's why it's important to schedule a meeting on branded applications right away, if you haven't already. The fruits of your labor can not only be expressed on the web and desktops, but also in mobile with a bit of tweaking. It's the same strategy expressed in two different vehicles, and there are efficiencies to be leveraged there. If you've already developed a widget, it might be pretty easily tweaked into a mobile app. And vice versa.

Figure out what your brand means to people and figure out a way to extend that utility to users. The tie-in will be more obvious for some brands than for others, but I'd be surprised to find a consumer brand that can't do this. If you're Goodyear, you might develop an application that tracks maintenance schedules for a car and reminds people to rotate their tires (or buy new ones). If you're Home Depot, give them something that lets them know what educational seminars are going on at their local stores. If you're a tour company, give them a branded currency converter. You get the idea.

If you haven't had the meeting with your marketing stakeholders and partners to kick off thinking about your brand in this way, schedule that meeting now.

Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com.