In the last installment of a four-part series on brand experience, Scorpion’s Justin Mink shares actionable insights on how to put brand experience into action as part of a cohesive brand and local marketing strategy.
In the first three parts of The Franchise Brand Experience Series, we laid out a step-by-step guide for leveraging brand experience as an engine of growth. By devoting careful attention to crafting, living, and communicating a meaningful brand, franchise leaders thoughtfully align stakeholders around a unique vision that drives financial performance and market share. In this fourth and final installment, we’ll provide actionable insights on how to put brand experience into action as part of a cohesive brand and local marketing strategy.
“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare”
— Japanese proverb
You’ve identified your brand’s soul, leveraged market research to align the vision with stakeholder needs, and formally documented a brand manifesto that serves to align and orient stakeholder behavior in lockstep with brand values. With a powerful brand engine purring, now is the time to put the marketing pedal to the metal.
Here’s the obvious rub: unlike a monolithic corporate brand, franchise marketing is a multi-headed hydra. Franchise leaders implicitly walk a tightrope, balancing overarching brand objectives with the complexities of aligning independent owner-operators. Franchisees often have their collective finger on the pulse of local market nuances and bring strong opinions, existing vendor relationships, and channel preferences to the table. This highwire act only gets trickier as the network expands — especially for those brands where the majority of owners are also operators.
This is why meaningfully weaving brand values — and the manifesto that proclaims your brand’s place in the world — into the brand experience for all stakeholders is so crucial. If your brand values are front and center during the franchisee sales engagement, then the odds of your franchisees consistently and uniformly sharing in the brand’s marketing ethos will be high – thereby eliminating endless debates over marketing tactics, messaging, and creative. For example, if your brand ethos centers around an uncommon and unmatched level of customer care, highlighting these values — and including a vetting process that ensures franchise candidates share this vision — will ensure that marketing campaigns highlighting customer care are fully embraced by your franchise partners.
Operationalizing marketing
Even if there is healthy (or otherwise) brand marketing debate within your network, corporate teams can still ensure that the brand experience is consistently front and center at the local level. Today’s standard franchise best practices entail corporate offering franchisees plug-and-play solutions for nearly all business functions — except for local marketing! Most franchisees are not — nor do they want to be — marketing experts. Few franchises wield the kind of brand power that all but guarantees success simply by swinging open the doors of a new location – which in large part explains why Chick-fil-A approves only 0.4 per cent of the 20,000 annual franchise applications it receives.
“Unlike a monolithic corporate brand, franchise marketing is a multi-headed hydra”
For the vast majority of franchises, local marketing success is critical from day one. Brands should think about local marketing in the same capacity as POS, financial reporting, CRM, accounting, and other uniformly shared systems: part of the value that the system offers to franchisees; value that ultimately serves both corporate and franchisee best interests. From websites to the photography in Google My Business and Yelp profiles, to standardized customer review engagement practices, to social media content and more, corporate can leverage the national ad and marketing fund (provided there is one) to control the brand message — and the brand experience — while providing tangible benefits to franchise owners.
That which cannot be measured cannot be improved (or approved!)
Of course, in today’s age of local marketing attribution and ROI accounting, brand values are only as good as brand performance — ideally as measured by revenue growth. While the power of the brand is one of the many factors that inform a franchise candidate’s buying decision, at the end of the day zees are focused on measurable local marketing performance. For someone who has just invested their life savings into joining a franchise, soft measurements like “brand engagement” don’t mean much. New franchise locations need revenue…and they need it fast.
If aligning brand and franchisee interests represents the tricky side of the franchise marketing coin, then a brand’s ability to mitigate risk and run limited-scale, local tests of brand marketing initiatives represents the positive side. By partnering with enthusiastic zees, corporate can help administer — as well as measure and fund — small-scale, local brand marketing campaigns with a creative focus on brand values. Even if most of the system is fixated on, for example, offers and discounts, the outcomes produced by local brand marketing “laser strikes” can be stack-ranked against other franchise locations’ campaigns to make a powerful case for campaigns that highlight brand experience as a means for driving customer acquisition and revenue. Local tests allow you to fail small and fail fast, while wins can be scaled slowly into additional test markets, then incorporated into the local marketing playbook once there is enough reliable data to instill confidence that performance can be reliably replicated systemwide.
Building a brand for the ages
Ultimately, opportunity cost is more challenging to measure over time than upfront cost. The devastating price of missed opportunity, however, is very real. There is nothing sadder in life than unrealized potential. Don’t let your brand fall into the scrap heap of franchise history due to being “just another franchise that sold ____,” or even worse, forgotten altogether. If you have vision, belief, and unwavering courage, the fruits of this labor are there for the taking.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• To create lasting value, the brand experience must be consistently marketed and communicated internally and externally
• Ensuring that franchise candidates share the core values of the brand will support corporate efforts to align brand and local marketing strategies
• Brand teams can sync local and brand marketing efforts while offering value for franchisees by “operationalizing” marketing in the same capacity as operational systems and functions
• Partnering with marketing-minded franchisees can afford brand teams the ability to test brand marketing campaigns designed to drive local marketing performance, which can then be communicated to the system as a means to drive adoption.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Justin Mink, CFE, is senior vice president of franchise growth at Scorpion. His passions for branding and digital marketing has guided a career that includes owning an events company in Washington D.C., brand marketing for USATODAY.com, leading the franchise team as an early employee at digital marketing firm ReachLocal, cofounding the marketing technology start-up Music Audience Exchange, and serving as chief marketing officer at New Frontier Data
