Revamped for 2025
Do you ever feel like pulling your hair out because you have so little time to handle all your company’s branding issues?
Whatever multiple-location or franchise business you’re in—retail, food, hospitality, services, healthcare, or another industry—you have a whole host of marketing challenges on your plate. Let’s talk about a few.
Why Franchisees Go Rogue
Picture this: Your franchisees, armed with good intentions and a passion for their local community, decide to “spice things up” with some off-brand materials. Suddenly, your sleek, professional, and consistent branding is replaced with clip-art flyers, a string of new colors, and Comic Sans fonts. Ouch.
The truth is franchisees often feel the need to customize brand elements to better connect with their unique customer base. But when they lack easy-to-use, corporate-approved resources, they’re left to fend for themselves. The result? A chaotic brand identity that confuses customers and dilutes your message.
Common Reasons Franchisees Ignore Corporate Branding Guidelines:
- Inability to Customize Assets: They want to localize the message but lack the tools to do it within brand guidelines.
- A High Level of Success: When a location is thriving, franchisees may feel empowered to “do their own thing.”
- An Attempt to Save a Failing Franchise: Desperate times call for desperate measures—even if that means ignoring the brand playbook. And we’ve all seen where that gets us—even more desperate!
Now that we’ve identified some of the most common reasons franchisees stray from brand guidelines, it’s important to take a closer look. Understanding the root causes behind each behavior isn’t just about correcting issues — it’s about preventing them from happening in the first place. Let’s break it down:
Inability to Customize Assets
Stock-standard assets are great for providing continuity throughout the franchise, but if they are too rigid, it can prove to be challenging. Many franchises will need to make minor changes, such as hours of operations or location address. Or they may need to replace images not relevant to the geographic location. For example, a clothing franchisee located in Florida would absolutely need to replace an image featuring a ski jacket with a warmer weather alternative. Staying in tune with local customers is critical, and not having the ability to make minor adjustments leads to attempts to replace the asset. Usually, that means a lower quality asset replaces the higher quality one. Not the direction you want your brand to go!
Related: Consistent and Personalized Marketing: How to Have Both
A High Level of Success
Corporate brands want their franchisees to be successful. However, that well-earned success can give franchisees the confidence to make independent marketing choices outside of corporate branding guidelines. After all, if a location is performing well, it’s natural for owners to believe they know their local audience best. In some cases, a rogue location’s success might even be tied to marketing tactics that don’t align with corporate standards. While this approach may seem effective in the short term, it can eventually lead to brand confusion, impact customer trust, and ultimately impact long-term sales. That’s why it’s essential to balance local personalization with brand consistency. Individual success should contribute to—rather compete with—the overall strength of the brand.
An Attempt to Save a Failing Franchise
As we mentioned earlier, owners facing challenges often feel pressure to make bold moves in an effort to turn things around. In these situations, it’s not uncommon for well-intentioned franchisees to stray from brand guidelines—whether through off-brand marketing materials or unapproved messaging. These actions may be driven by urgency, but they can unintentionally harm both the local business and broader brand.
How to Fix These Challenges
You can see how a franchisee can easily go rogue. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix. The solution lies in a centralized, user-friendly brand management portal. By providing marketing asset management, you can empower franchisees, sales teams, and marketers to customize materials without going off-brand. Here’s how:
- Customizable Templates: Allow franchisees to tweak certain fields (like hours and location info) while keeping core brand elements locked.
- Real-Time Updates: Push out the latest materials instantly and set expiration dates to prevent the use of outdated assets.
- Permission-Based Access: Brand management portals control who can access what, ensuring consistency while giving teams the tools they need.
Related: Best Practices for Storing Marketing Materials Across Multiple Locations
With the right brand management portal in place, you can eliminate rogue branding and keep your local teams happy. Additionally, you’ll gain efficiencies and cost-savings that help everyone’s bottom line. It’s a win-win-win.
We help multi-location brands simplify their marketing every day. So, to keep your teams from going off script, talk with us about Ignition, our proprietary brand management platform—and harness the power of a platform built to help all your teams!
