[Updated for 2025]
Ever feel like your brand has a split personality? One location’s social media page nails a cool, edgy vibe while another’s flyer looks like it was designed in 1995. Meanwhile, the corporate branding you’ve spent so much time perfecting is either missing entirely or somehow mashed up in the mix, with a messy nod to your logo and color scheme. The result? A chaotic brand identity that leaves everyone scratching their heads—and worse—not knowing what to think about your company’s products and services.
Let’s Talk Overall Brand Versus Localized Brand
It’s common for franchise and multi-location branding to get segmented when the corporate branding team designs and maintains one set of brand guidelines and the locations try to either tailor it to their location’s preferences or set it aside in favor of their own designs. It’s not that your franchisees or various locations are trying to sabotage your brand—their strategy may be sound if they’re just trying to connect with their local customers’ preferences. But it usually ends up confusing more than converting—and hurting sales.
The good news? You don’t have to choose between a strong and cohesive overall brand identity and successful localized marketing. You can have both—and do both well!
So, How Do You Keep Your Brand on Point?
There are a number of smart strategies to ensure your local team and corporate team are working together to help your brand grow:
Combine Consistency and Personalization
Since building a brand requires both a consistent look and feel as well as information and imagery reflecting local stores, consistency is key. Ensure your brand guidelines detail how core brand elements are designed—like logos, colors, and fonts. Then tailor messaging with personalization. As consistent content helps build brand trust and reliability, personalization lets local managers and franchisees insert their specific information. For instance, they might need to swap out the address and phone number for each store—or customize promotional materials to promote a Florida beachside event or a Georgia peach festival. Hello local flavor!
When you strike this balance between unified and localized, you’re ensuring your brand’s overall look and feel stays cohesive while allowing local stores to connect with their unique customer base—it’s a real win-win for you and your customers, and it helps you expand your brand.
Related: Build Better Franchisee/Franchisor Relationships
Say Au Revoir to Passé Materials
One of the biggest headaches for multi-location and franchise brands is ensuring everyone’s utilizing the most up-to-date materials. It’s so easy for version control to get out of control with too many chefs in that kitchen. Marketing assets tend to be scattered on people’s desktops, drives, and email threads, and tracking them down becomes an exercise in patience—and a complete waste of time. Not to mention an easy way to fall out of compliance with branding standards and even regulatory requirements. To get everyone on the same page and grow the brand, it’s important to establish version control.
Related: Multi-Unit Brand & Asset Management
Ensure Social Media Stays on Brand
Social media can be a goldmine for customer engagement, but when every location is running its own accounts, things can quickly spiral out of control. Pre-approved, brand-compliant posts need to live in a secure and centralized location that local managers easily access and publish—and corporate teams control with permissions. This ensures messaging stays coordinated while your local teams engage with local audiences in their own unique voice. And both strategies are important—although you can create an overall branded look and feel, you can’t just copy and paste it into social media since that’s where people really connect. You need to treat each market separately. With a smarter approach to social media, you’ll build a bigger brand.
Make Consistency Plus Personalization Easy with a Brand Management Portal
Want more good news? Yes, you can have consistency and personalization. And you can also achieve the above strategies with an intuitive, powerful tool. Enter the brand management platform, also known as a brand management portal, marketing asset management system, web-to-print portal, e-commerce portal, and a host of other monikers. This comprehensive cloud-based platform allows all your locations to access and use the same marketing materials, from business cards and brochures to social media graphics and email banners, to trade show graphics and store signage (and more). But here’s the game changing part: it also helps you implement customized campaigns for each location. And it covers the above strategies.
Version control? Check! With a cloud-based marketing asset management system, you can push out updates instantly and even set expiration dates on old files. If you don’t want teams changing assets, you can lock them entirely to retain your branding. And you can ensure everyone’s using the same ingredients—so no one is accidentally handing out brochures from three years ago or using a retired logo on their social media posts. That gets confusing fast!
Want on brand social media? With this secure 24/7 platform, team members with permission can access the materials from any device while ensuring the same look and feel from location to location. So, it’s locked and loaded and ready to be customized for each location’s customers!
Boost All Collaboration and Control
Brand management platforms also marry teamwork with brand control. You can set up permission-based logins to ensure the right people can access the right materials. Want the corporate team to handle high-level campaigns while individual store managers handle localized promotions? Easy. You can even decide whether the corporate office foots the bill for print materials or if each location handles its own expenses. Print and promo pieces will be printed and delivered directly to individual locations, and digital assets are available for immediate download.
It’s a cinch to manage.
Your Marketing Control Center for Consistency Plus Personalization
By centralizing your marketing assets in one easy-to-use platform, you’re eliminating confusion, saving time, and protecting your brand’s identity. Plus, when customers visit different locations, they’ll feel that familiar, trustworthy experience they’ve come to love—no matter where they are. If you’re tired of chasing down rogue logos and outdated flyers, a brand management portal is the tool that will take you to the next level of branding. It’s the perfect way to keep your brand consistent while helping local teams to shine. And the best part? Your customers will thank you for it—with both their loyalty and their wallets.
Want to learn how to harness this consistency powerhouse and get your branding under control? Talk to us about what our proprietary brand management platform, Ignition, can do for your company, and see it in action with a free demo. You’ll get the best of both worlds—seamless marketing that builds your brand, and personalized localization that drives sales. Take a test drive today!
And don’t miss our next article in the series: “Why Franchisees (and Other Teams) Don’t Follow Corporate Brand Standards”
