Brand Consistency Management for Franchise Marketing

In the eyes of your clients, your brand is your business. At a glance, your brand shows your customers what you stand for. It also serves to make you stand out from similar companies, services and products. In order to do that, your brand needs to be an easy reference guide for your clients. That means clarity – and it means consistency. Your franchise marketing and every other part of the way you operate your business needs to be executed with brand consistency borne uppermost in your mind...

What is brand consistency?

Brand consistency means ensuring that your franchise marketing tells the same story and presents the same face and tone wherever it is found. This will be the face and tone that will be your brand as far as your clients are concerned. To be completely accurate, it means making sure that every single part of the way your business operates is on-brand:

• Your franchise marketing
• Your colours and logos
• The way you interact with your customers

The importance of brand consistency in your franchise marketing

Brand consistency is vital when marketing your franchise for several major reasons:

1) Recognition

You want your customers to be able to pick you out of a crowd. When they see your logo, colours font and familiar slogans, you want them to be able to say “I know that company.” This leads, based on the quality of your products and services, to a feeling of “I trust that company.” But if they can't see and recognise you first, they won't come to trust you.

2) Familiarity

One of the main strengths of the franchise business model is that people like it because they know what they are getting: Wherever they find your franchise anywhere in the world, they know that the services and quality they are getting are going to be reliably the same. The way to ensure that this is true – and that the overall impression your customer has before the purchase is that it's true – you need to have consistent branding in all of your marketing. This way, your customer become used to seeing “you” everywhere.

3) Automatic trust

The word “franchise” is familiar to almost everyone. But not everyone really thinks about what that it really means: A franchise is a network of individual businesses run by different entrepreneurs under the same branding. Only by ensuring that your brand is consistent across all channels do you reinforce the impression that you are one cohesive business which your clients can automatically trust. This is true when it comes to attracting new franchisees too.

How to achieve brand consistency in your franchise marketing

Staying in control of the promotional activities of your network is absolutely vital. This can involve:

• Definition: the biggest brands clearly define what sets them apart. Check out the brand guidelines of any of them. You'll see incredibly precise details on the font, logos, tone of voice, slogans and where they can be used.
• Showing as well as telling: as well as defining your brand, you can provide examples and content of it in action. Send templates or completed professional marketing materials to all of your franchisees and you'll know that they're definitely staying on-brand.

Convincing all of your franchisees of the importance of brand consistency and following the guidelines and definitions you have provided is a constant task for even the most profitable brands. This means you need to support, promote and even reward the success of franchisees who do work hard to promote your brand within the guidelines you've provided. Even a small reward and promotion of their efforts to your network can be enough to demonstrate the value of achieving brand consistency in your franchise marketing.

Do your brand consistency efforts sometimes get sidelined by your franchisees? Local Fame helps franchises of all sizes create, establish and enact powerful brand consistency in their franchise marketing. Contact us now and let us know how you'd like your current marketing to be more effective.