Brand image: between franchisees and franchisors

This is the first part of our cycle "How to organize local digital marketing for a franchise network?" in partnership with The Franchise Club.
In this article, we will discuss Brand image & collaboration between franchisors and franchisees: What are the roles and responsibilities of each?

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A context that makes us rethink the way to organize daily marketing between franchisees and franchisors.

With the arrival of covid, all retail chains faced a common problem: a lack of resources and time at headquarters to manage local marketing and communications for points of sale.

Since March 2020, departments in charge of digital marketing for their network's points of sale have had to continuously update data for all establishments simultaneously: changes in hours, service availability, communication on health measures, etc.

In parallel, the people responsible for this type of task are often on partial unemployment or overwhelmed with other urgent tasks and are sometimes unable to handle all these requests and updates on a daily basis. 

Given the context, it is interesting to start involving franchisees in this daily management. Who better than franchisees to communicate on their local specificities?

The 3 actions for an aligned brand image

Each network has its specificities and some already involve franchisees in some of the management of their local marketing and communications. Giving franchisees a free hand can also occasionally lead to a failure to respect the brand image: wording of communications, type of images,... In most cases, establishment managers are not trained in these aspects and need a framework to undertake these actions.

1. Train your network

In order to ensure respect for the brand image, while involving its network, the headquarters must train its points of sale, provide them with a complete kit with everything franchisees need to make things easier for them and make them autonomous. By properly preparing decentralization by training its network, we ensure that the local respects the guidelines and that there is uniformity among all establishments, particularly in communication, for example.

In practice: franchisors can organize conferences, webinars, share content and best practices with their network on a daily basis.

2. Determine the degree of involvement

Upstream of this training, the head office can decide on the degree of decentralization of its local digital marketing: which actions are the responsibility of franchisees and on which channels.
For example: updating opening hours and services, posting, responding to customer reviews,... on Google, Facebook, directories, GPS,...

3. Prepare content galleries

The best way to ensure that the brand image is respected is to offer content galleries (images, publications, promotions, responses to reviews, ...) to its network.

In practice, with regard to posting, headquarters can make available a library of reusable templates for its franchisees, or let them have the freedom to create campaigns related to the current events of each of their establishments.

For the review management part, the head office can provide a library of generic responses to help franchisees respond easily, while respecting the brand's tone of voice and avoiding any clumsiness.

This is the first part of our cycle "How to organize local digital marketing for a franchise network?" in partnership with The Franchise Club.
In the second part of our cycle, we will address the theme "How to organize decentralization?".