What marketing departments will look like in 2020

I asked this question on Quora earlier this week: What will marketing departments look like in 2020? Special thanks to @dberkowitz (his quora), @drewhawkins (his quora)  and @viajerosonico (his quora) for answering the question.  And thanks to @tonykinard who answered the question via my blog.

The qualities that marketing departments will need to have in 2020 that these guys identified are (in random order)

– An always learning, student-like attitude

– Listening and communicating more with their customers, most likely through social channels

– A dedication to consumer insights and…

– Those insights need to impact the entire organization, not just the marketing department

– Marketing will find itself in entirely new and yet-to-be-discovered areas as technology explodes, requiring marketing departments to be far more technical, more creative and more analytical

– Internal branding will be a much more emphasized part of a marketing department’s responsibility

– Skills of social and mobile will need to move out of just the marketing department and into the rest of the organization

I think the “aha” for me when considering this question is that by 2020 “digital” will be about 30 years old.  Which means CMO’s in their 50’s will have used the web their entire adult life. And the marketing department as a whole (guessing median age around 40) will be true digital natives.  So the idea of being flexible, fast-paced, measuring results, staying up to speed on technological advancements, etc, will be something they embrace completely.  It will ooze from them the way it does from those of us that have been in digital since the beginning.

Personally I can’t wait until everyone in marketing has a digital background.  It can’t happen soon enough in my opinion.