Brand image: between franchisees and franchisors

This is the first part of our cycle "How to organize local digital marketing d’un réseau de franchise ?" in partnership with The Franchise Club.
In this article we will address d' Brand image & collaboration franchisors/franchisés : What are the ròles 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 brand networks have been faced with a common problem: the lack of resources and time at the headquarters level to manage local marketing and communications of the points of sale.

Since March 2020, the departments responsible for digital marketing of their network's points of sale must continuously update data for all establishments simultaneously: schedule changes, 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 the franchisees in this daily management. Who better than the franchisees to communicate about 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

To ensure the brand's image is respected, while involving its réseau, the siège must train its points of sale, provide them with a complete kit with everything the franchisés need to make things easier for them and make them autonomous. By properly preparing the décentralisation by training its réseau, we s’ensure that the local respects the guidelines and that there is uniformité among all the établissements, especially in communication for example. 

In practice: franchisors can organize conférences, webinars, share content and best practices à their réseau daily.

2. Determine the degree of involvement

Ahead of this training, the siège can décider the degré of décentralisation of its local digital marketing: which actions the franchisés are responsible for and on which channels.
For example: the mise à jour of opening hours and services, the publication of posts, the réponse to customer reviews,... on Google, Facebook, directories, GPS,...

3. Prepare content galleries

The best façon to guarantee respect for the l'brand image is to offer content galleries (images, publications, promotions, réponse to reviews, ...) à its réseau.

In practice, regarding the post publication, the siège can make available a bibliothèque of template réutilisable by its franchisés, or let them have the control so that qu’eux même can créer campaigns linked to l’actualité of each of their établissement. 

For the part review management, the siège can make available a library of generic responses to help franchisees to answer easily, while respecting the brand's tone of voice and avoiding any awkwardness. 

This is the first part of our cycle "How to organize local digital marketing d’un franchise network ?" in partnership with The Franchise Club.
In the second part of our cycle we will address the topic "How to organize decentralization ?".