Millions of consumers are on mobile, but marketers that want to reach them are facing a big challenge: It’s hard to determine what constitutes marketing success on a smartphone or a tablet.

To come up with new kinds of mobile metrics, the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) this week announced a new think tank, with the support of a number of brand-name companies, including Coca-Cola, Unilever, T-Mobile, American Express, and Hilton.

The MMA Marketing Attribution Think Tank (MATT) intends to tackle a series of issues troubling marketers, the first being multi-touch attribution, a marketing approach that tries to understand the entire path of a customer’s journey. It’s something that’s much harder to understand on mobile than on the desktop.

“Multi-touch attribution will be the anchor of future marketing attribution. However, it’s an area where marketers lack the depth of knowledge and experience to evaluate solutions,” MMA CEO Greg Stuart told Mobile Marketing Watch. “Add in a highly fragmented pool of solution vendors, each delivering a different modeling technique, and it’s nearly impossible for marketers to confidently select and apply the right solutions for their business.”

MMA had already been researching this issue, but MATT will help to formalize the effort. The association has teamed with the Marketing Science Institute to help support any technical development that needs to take place.

As a whole, the corporations supporting the think tank believe this sort of collaboration can only help the industry—despite the fact that some of the companies involved (such as Choice Hotels and Hilton, or Unilever and Johnson & Johnson) are direct competitors.

“The truth is we can all benefit from better tool sets,” Allstate’s executive vice president of marketing, Sanjay Gupta, told Ad Age. “It still doesn’t make it equal from a marketing standpoint, because what works for me may not work for my competitor. So we will try to build edges, but I don’t think too many marketers believe the tool set itself will give them an edge.”

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