During my time as the CEO of a national jeweller franchise, one of my functions was to work with the (highly experienced and well respected) contracted marketing agency to formulate an annual calendar of marketing activity that would ultimately be delivered across New Zealand. The franchisees concerned contributed funds to a National Marketing Budget, and this was then spread across a range of indirect and direct marketing channels – both digital and non-digital.
As I worked with the Board of Directors to evolve this company, it became clear that in order for the national franchise as a whole to enjoy greater brand awareness and market share we needed to influence each franchisee to align their local marketing efforts with the Board-approved national marketing activity schedule.
So we introduced a document which called for all franchisees to perform certain behaviours that – when practiced – would contribute towards the company achieving its brand (market) positioning objectives. In this document was the expectation that each franchisee would perform local level marketing activities that aligned to the national marketing activity schedule – including newspaper advertising, radio advertising, etc. The production of visual marketing resources at a local level by franchisees was readily achieved through posting a wide range of electronic files in an online file library – which franchisees could access via the internet, download and either use themselves or send them to their preferred local advertising agency for adaptation before final use. This measure ensured that corporate livery protocols (branding in particular) were upheld and consistent across the country.
Like any brand-building strategy, the execution and support of the given strategy by all relevant stakeholders is what will determine the success of the given initiative or not. So what we asked all franchisees to do was submit a simple completed survey each year that required each franchisee to disclose what local level marketing activity they had implemented. We incentivised the return of these surveys using certificates and vouchers to recognise and reward those franchisees who demonstrated a high level of compliance in respect of aligning their local level marketing initiatives with national level marketing activity.