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Consistency is Key: 5 Steps to Ensuring Brand Consistency in a Franchise System

By Naranga Marketing

Franchise consistency tips | Naranga

1. Define your brand and set guidelines.

As a franchisee enters a new franchise system, educating them on the brand, brand standards and voice is extremely important.  From development to opening and beyond, the franchisee is responsible for how customers perceive the brand on a local level, including customer service, cleanliness and overall brand appeal. By establishing brand requirements up front, it helps the franchisee to be accountable for delivering on those brand values.

2. Set franchisees up for success.

Owning a franchise is a 24/7 job.  From marketing to payroll to operations to customer experience, the franchisee is ultimately responsible for the success of the franchise and executing on corporate recommendations.  By providing franchisees with tools to help them maintain brand consistency, including artwork, training, best practices and more, it gives the local franchisee support and positions them for the next level.

3. Regular visits are key.

Franchisors like to know what is going on everywhere all of the time, but can’t always be onsite at every single location on a daily basis. It is important that franchisors take the time to send staff into the field on a regular basis and audit current locations to ensure that they are maintaining brand standards.  Naranga’s nsight centralizes field auditing capabilities, allowing franchises to maintain a consistent and high quality customer experience.  A franchise’s field audit team uploads, updates and scores locations in real-time, tracks any brand inconsistencies and immediately push out plans to correct them. This tool helps with the franchise management process and ensures that these regular visits are productive and provide action items for the franchisee.

4. Training beyond the grand opening.

With many franchise systems, local franchisees go through a rigorous training prior to opening, including a comprehensive look at products, employee management and the various elements that go into running that franchise successfully.  Where many brands become inconsistent is beyond that grand opening phase, when they do not have ongoing training.  Proper training ensures consistency, particularly when introducing new menu items, product lines or service offerings. Creating, distributing and monitoring training across multiple locations can be a difficult, costly challenge. You might even be updating your training manuals using physical binders, which an expensive and time-consuming process. A better solution, Naranga’s nspire, provides easy-to-use video and visual technologies to instantly record, upload and distribute training videos and photographs to your team. This technology helps to ensure that local franchisees are getting ongoing, visual education without someone physically having to be at each location.

5. Communication

Communication between franchisor and franchisee is necessary to achieve brand consistency across multi-locations.  By providing ongoing communication through training, email updates and adhoc conversations, franchisees can get further insight into the brand’s mission and goals and take that back to their local franchise.  When a franchise goes beyond 100 locations, it becomes even more important to find a way to communicate company objectives to each franchisee, ideally through a centralized operations management solution.  At Naranga, if you need help managing the operations of multiple locations, give us a call or request a demo to learn more.

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Tags: Brand Standards