What a lot of brands are missing in their digital marketing strategy is common-engine thinking. As brands chase social media and leave a trail of long-forgotten campaigns in their wake, what’s needed is a solid, enterprise foundation that allows for any new computing trend to be added or subtracted while always making a tangible deposit in the brand.

Working in the infancy of ecommerce slightly more than a decade ago, the only survivors of the first bust were the companies who had developed their own common engine: effectively allowing for attrition among storefront brands while maintaining a behind-the-scenes hub that could add new sites faster and easier with every installation. If one site needs customization, now that improvement is available to every other site being driven by the engine.

What results from common-engine thinking is a distinct advantage for every team that touches it:

Strategy

With every campaign and distributed presence sending back metrics, strategists can deconstruct and re-synthesize all kinds of trends specific to the history of the brand-audience relationship. This singular perspective would be awesome to only spend time improving strategies that work and completely new ideas.

Interaction Design

Within the digital channels outlined in the strategy, Information Architects, User Experience professionals, and Interaction Designers can quickly see the interaction paths that the intended audience feels most comfortable with. Comment boxes or Twitter integration? Ratings like Digg or ratings like YouTube? Common-engine intelligence should be able to provide these answers immediately and conclusively; reducing all those highly ambiguous, political meetings to just a few less ambiguous political meetings.

Visual Design and Copy

What visual designer or copywriter wouldn’t love this set of components and quantitative looks at what has worked? Common engines allow them to focus only on bringing those elements through the specific context of the interaction and brand voice.

Programmers

If there’s anything programmers hate, it’s having to start all over again with ambiguous (at best) direction. Working from a common-engine architecture using Web services means a lot more iterating and improving on components that have already been tested and used in a live environment.

Brand Management

Last but not least, brand managers will love the ability to quickly mobilize digital initiatives across the platforms that make the most sense. Even better, brand management can quickly kill anything that doesn’t work, and continue adding niches with contextually focused content — without a heavy lift every single time.

As a practical example of what I’m talking about, while at Emerge we had a great integrated effort with Upshot using the common-engine framework for Miller, allowing the brand to quickly create new educational video sites for bartenders.

First, the conceptual model of how Miller Lite ServerSpeak works:
Here’s a short video showing how we got from user flow through architecture and interface:

Have you used a common engine for your marketing efforts? What do you think? Leave a comment below or continue the conversation on Twitter @mleis.

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