The first hurdle for local marketing efforts is ensuring that every brand engagement, in every location, across every channel, is consistent in quality and message. In other words, your first challenge is protecting your brand value, which is estimated to be worth about 17 percent of your business value.[i]

Protecting your brand is vital if you want to keep customers engaged and loyal, but if you’ve got reps across the country promoting it, how do you make sure your message and experience stays consistent without restricting franchisees’ ability to launch localized programs and campaigns?

(After all, we’ve all played “Telephone,” and we know what happens to even the simplest message when it’s passed from hand to hand without any guidance from the originator.)

The solution: centralize management of your brand by storing approved digital assets in one, easy-to-access location, allowing users to customize text and images for their own local audiences, order kits of materials and signage or electronically download localized marketing materials—all while staying in compliance with brand guidelines.

67 percent of top performing companies have a strategy to centralize brand and marketing functions while empowering local offices to conduct their own marketing efforts.^[ii]

[i] https://www.oceantomo.com/intangible-asset-market-value-study/
[ii] http://www.distribion.com/the-rise-of-distributed-marketing

How to Protect the Value of Your Brand by Taking Control of Your Franchise Marketing Operations

Maintaining the value and health of your brand requires consistency across every asset you put out into the world, whether it’s a billboard, in-store sign, or anything else that leaves an impression on prospects and customers.

Each brand interaction, no matter how big or small, is an opportunity to shape the consumer perceptions that drive decision-making. It’s up to marketers to make sure each of those interactions strengthens the brand by providing consistent, high-quality touch points across the board.

This is especially true for franchise marketers responsible for maintaining a single brand identity across multiple locations. Here, brand integrity often boils down to brand control.

While every franchisee is an extension of the same brand, it’s, well, not uncommon for franchise owners to have differing opinions on how best to market themselves locally. Sometimes, unfortunately, these ideas don’t quite adhere to the standards that give your brand the power it has.

In this guide, we’ll unpack the challenge of maintaining brand standards across multiple franchise locations, frame a set of solutions, and explore how technology is playing a huge role in helping franchise marketers act on them and get back to what they do best: developing compelling campaigns that drive growth.

Inconsistent Branding Signals a Larger Problem

Branding issues across franchise locations is one of the biggest threats to brand integrity and a leading cause of frustration and anxiety among marketers back at the corporate office.

Cases of inconsistent franchise branding can range from mild to severe. Maybe a hurried franchise owner ignored their brand guidelines and used some unapproved fonts on their point-of-purchase signs.

Or maybe the infraction was more egregious. A franchise owner might have launched an unapproved, hastily-planned direct mail campaign, blanketing an entire zip code with last year’s promotion by mistake. Making matters worse, the mailer featured a pixelated, outdated logo design you would have caught in a second.

Both are brand infractions and both can undo the hard work you put into making your brand meaningful to prospects and customers.

To avoid branding inconsistencies, big or small, marketers first need to realize that they’re symptoms of a larger problem: a lack of control. More specifically, a lack of control over what franchise locations can access, store, use, and order.

Today, these problems have been largely eliminated by technology solutions designed to improve distributed marketing operations. When utilized to their full potential, these tools give marketers total control over their franchise owners’ marketing activities without taking on more work themselves, and in many cases, reduces their workload.

In addition to eliminating brand inconsistencies, these tools streamline distributed marketing operations across the board, freeing you from endless operational management so you can get back to building amazing campaigns

The Challenges of Franchise Brand Control

All right, let’s jump in and dive into where, specifically, a lack of control can give rise to brand-damaging issues between the franchisor and its franchisees.

• • Decentralized asset management. Without a centralized system for managing marketing assets at the local level, you can’t really know what’s sitting on a franchisee’s hard drive. Yes, you’ve sent this season’s new brand assets out to everyone, but do you have the controls in place to ensure they’re actually being used? If not, all you can do is cross your fingers and hope that the materials locked away on users’ computers and company folders are current and accessible.
  • Lack of visibility. You can’t manage what you can’t see. This is incredibly important in a complex network of franchise locations spread across the map—each using the kind of piecemeal, decentralized systems we mentioned before. Without visibility into what each location is accessing, creating, and ordering, it’s impossible to be proactive in maintaining brand standards across the company. Instead, you can watch and react only after mistakes are made and damage is done.
  • Lack of approval. While this ties in closely with visibility, it’s worth breaking out on its own. It’s one thing to see the marketing materials each location creates for itself, but it’s another to actually control them through an approval mechanism. You, the marketer, can only be confident that your brand is being adequately maintained when you’re the one reviewing and approving those materials before they enter the world. (As we’ll explore later, this doesn’t have to mean taking on extra work when you have the right tools. Just the opposite, actually.)
  • Disconnected print/fulfillment. In addition to planning and creating marketing materials, control is also often lost in the marketing supply chain used to print and deliver them. The more complex this chain is, the more chances there are for things to go wrong within it. In franchises, the weakest link is typically between the systems used to make orders and the systems used to print and fulfill them. Most franchises and other multi-location organizations find they need to partner with multiple print vendors in order to cover locations across several geographic areas. But in addition to the opportunity and actual costs of managing multiple vendors, this can force you to integrate multiple systems, inviting opportunities for expensive errors and leading to wasted spend by making things way more complex than they need to be. More dangerously, franchises without an approved print vendor often find franchisees printing from own in-office printers or turning to their local print shop, creating pieces that don’t meet the high quality your consumers expect—or, more often than not, your brand standards.
  • Lack of inventory and expense tracking. Keeping track of marketing inventory across multiple franchises is critical for both avoiding missed opportunities due to shortages and saving budget that would otherwise be wasted on overages, stock obsolescence, and print and warehousing costs. Without the ability to get real-time visibility here, it’s up to you to ensure your figures are constantly accurate and up-to-date across the entire network—a task that, again, wastes valuable time while creating a constant sense of anxiety.

There’s a lot of moving pieces here. With so many challenges involved in maintaining brand standards, it can be hard to know where to start turning things around to regain control over the marketing operations across your franchise system.

To help you get your bearings and take the first steps toward getting there, we’ve laid out a plan designed specifically for franchise marketers who know there’s room for improvement in their operations.

Improving franchise brand integrity

The following steps offer a generic guide to improving brand maintenance throughout your organization. Use it to contextualize the challenges you face by identifying specific opportunities for improvement and make the case for getting the tools you need to take advantage of them.

1. Centralize assets and materials on a single system. Today, franchise marketing teams don’t have to settle for email attachments to deliver brand assets to each location. Technology has stepped in to solve this problem entirely.
2. Centralized marketing platforms like U.Connect let marketers upload assets to one place where every franchise owner can access and use them, simplifying the distribution of marketing content across regions and divisions and from corporate to local markets.
3. Develop assets for local customization. With a centralized marketing distribution platform in place, you can finally get some relief by safely offloading local projects to local end-users by giving each location access to branded campaign templates and other materials they can use to create the kinds of personalized local campaigns customers expect from top brands.
4. With a platform like U.Connect, each end-user can populate approved, pre-designed templates to create their own high-quality marketing collateral while maintaining the level of control you need by locking certain areas of content, opening others for customization, and putting an approval step in place.
5. Make approval easy. Without a system designed for approval, the necessary task of reviewing local assets can be a huge time-suck.
6. Approval-enabled distributed marketing platforms like U.Connect make it easy to get notified of approval requests and easily review materials to get campaigns up and running faster.
7. Let franchisees print approved materials on-demand. When franchisees are empowered to create their own marketing campaigns (protected through approval, of course), a whole new door to efficiency opens for everyone: web-to-print.

In short, whatever tedious processes are currently in place to place print orders can be reduced to the click of a button. With U.Connect, for example, users can create and order customized print and digital communications just-in-time, leveraging Personalized Print-On-Demand (PPOD) tools to radically improve the ordering and fulfillment

All the opportunities for improvement you knew might be possible, finally are possible thanks to the technology platforms at a franchise marketer’s disposal.

Unlike other digital systems that only end up creating more complexity, these tools are genuine solutions, specifically designed to provide measurable ROI in the form of greater efficiency and productivity and the less tangible but equally important area of brand equity.