Marketing Strategy, Misc, News

The Franchise Marketing Dilemma

Currently there are around 48,000 franchise businesses in the UK , a number which has doubled in the last 25 years, across 900 franchise brands that now employ over 621,000 people (an increase of 70% in last 10 years).  Franchising is big business.   For good reason too.

Banks prefer to lend money to franchises as they are proven business models with a higher success rate.  For the exact same reason, they are growing in popularity for those looking to start their own business.  Why spend years on trying to establish and build a brand and business model, when you can pay for one that is already established and likely to return a profit within its first two years?

For all the benefits of franchising and investing in a franchise model, there are still some issues which really impact on the potential success of a new franchise operator.

Let me explain.


The franchisor perspective

One of the ways of doing this is through having a central marketing team who control these elements – and it is commonplace for franchisors to charge franchisees a monthly marketing fee to manage this on their behalf. 

The franchisee perspective

By the same token, franchisors also need franchisees to be self-sufficient.  Franchisees are, after all, responsible for running their own business.  No franchise network is going to successfully grow if all franchisees are reliant on head office for all leads that come in.

Sales training without marketing training is missing the point (as is the reverse).  Although they are two separate disciplines they are very closely aligned.

The franchise marketing dilemma

So we end up having franchisors wanting to centrally control the brand (understandably) but not wanting to be held responsible for localised lead generation campaign activity.

On the other side we have franchisees who, after all, are independent business owners and want to have a degree of autonomy over their marketing efforts.  Ultimately, their success or failure as a franchisee is going to be highly influenced by how successful their local marketing efforts are.


The obvious solution

Until franchisors realise that it is their responsibility to upskill franchisees in a more rounded way to maximise their potential performance, then franchisees are never going to generate them the potential royalties that they could.  So figures, such as franchises contributing £15.1bn to the economy, sounds impressive but with a little more focus on the marketing upskilling of its franchisees, could be so much more.

The benefits in getting it right!

You can quickly see why investing in marketing training for franchisees is potentially a “no-brainer” for any reasonably sized franchise network.

Unless the penny drops and franchisors realise the benefits in helping franchisees market themselves more effectively, marketing as a discipline will sadly continue to underperform in the franchise industry.

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Ian Kirk

Founder at Opportunity Marketing

Ian is the founder of Opportunity Marketing marketing, with over 18 years of experience in successfully setting up marketing departments, creating marketing strategies and implementing these strategies across a wide number of SME companies in both the B2B and B2C sectors through a variety of channels.

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