How to Manage Franchise Brand Consistency

Your franchise brand can be one of your most valuable assets because it conveys a sense of familiarity, trust, and professionalism to franchise owners and potential local customers alike. Managing brand consistency is critical to achieving consistent growth. But brand consistency within a franchise is difficult to achieve because of the sheer number of stakeholders and brand ambassadors who are supposed to follow the same guidelines. You can deploy resources in a few areas to maximize that consistency.

3 Tips for Franchise Brand Management

Multi-location brands need support to achieve franchise brand compliance. Here are three ways to provide that to local owners, the home office team, and all stakeholders.

Provide Brand Guidance and Franchise Training

Local business owners opt for the franchise model to minimize extra work. This should apply to branding, too. So, enable franchisees to use established franchise brand guidelines instead of starting from scratch.

It is crucial to include both dos and don’ts in brand guidelines. You can express these in several formats:

• A corporate brand guide
• Standards for employee uniforms and facility appearance
• Branded photography libraries
• Templates for creating content on various digital platforms
• Social media guides
• Franchise training and continuing education
• Webinars and regional coaching sessions
• Corporate-controlled processes to minimize branding variance

Corporate processes, franchise brand guidelines, and training also support a consistent web presence, which helps prevent things like rogue websites and rogue Google Business Profiles (GBPs) created by individual owners.

Adjust and supplement guidance to correct current or recurring problems. Location-specific course corrections are easier when you can measure and meet them where they are.

Monitor and Measure

It’s helpful to share the importance and the responsibility of monitoring and managing your franchise brand’s reputation. Awareness reduces mistakes. The best way to support awareness systemwide is to provide tools for monitoring—and positively influencing—brand reputation and recognition.

Provide tools and guidance for monitoring and responding to both negative and positive reviews. Reviews management is typically a franchise owner’s responsibility across local listings, even if the franchisor manages other aspects of local listings. Many local listings management solutions allow for simple management of this division of responsibility, including tiered access levels and notifications for new reviews.

Establish and monitor customer service Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This allows both corporate and local franchise owners to set goals and track progress. Start franchise brand compliance metrics from the top-down, measuring sources like the local owner’s Google Business Profile or CRM. At a minimum, begin with customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), first response time (FRT), and customer churn.

Plan periodic on-site visits to franchise locations with a focus on help and remediation, rather than punitive inspections. Customer surveys and secret shoppers can also be helpful in getting real-world feedback on how your customers view your franchisees and brand.

Now that you can quantify problems, jump in and walk with local owners.

Offer Hands-on Support

There’s a learning curve after your newest location opens its doors. Be patient with the new owner/location, especially early on. The support of headquarters and peers can create a lot of confidence. Here are a few ways to implement multi-location brand support.

If staffing allows, provide an operations partner or a franchise operations coach. This representative from the main office can guide new owners through obstacles and provide examples of successful strategies that align with the brand.

Consider providing call center support and management. This frees your owners to focus on the job at hand while ensuring a consistent voice on the line across all locations.

Coordinating paid media through co-op funds, organizing regional campaigns, and providing other corporate-led marketing support can pay dividends for everyone involved.

There are secondary benefits of hands-on local support provided by a franchisor. A recent International Franchise Association (IFA) report found that:

• Two of the franchisor-provided benefits that franchisees most valued to help combat inflation were (1) sharing best practices and (2) assisting with customer marketing.
• National-local collaboration in franchises supports adoption of innovative strategies, like leveraging technology, to enhance operational efficiency.

Improve Your Brand Consistency Today

When you promote and maintain franchise brand consistency, you protect goodwill value and foster a strong, loyal customer base along with franchise owner satisfaction! As brand awareness increases, you can be confident that your audience truly understands your brand’s value and message. This alone is a competitive advantage against other franchise brands and local mom-and-pop players. 

Branding is an important part of a successful franchise. For additional in-depth ideas about brand consistency and the tactics for fantastic results, consult the Franchise Marketing Playbook. It’s packed with expert franchise advice on branding and marketing!