Your brand is what keeps ‘em coming back for more, it’s what creates loyalty and sparks word of mouth. Your brand is your unique competitive advantage, but it’s an edge that’s easy to lose, especially with expansion. The objective is to never let your brand become diluted or misrepresented across multiple locations. One store is cake, but 10? 100? That’s a different story. These are the three core objectives for protecting your brand.

Support Marketing Efforts

In a recent post here on the Action Card blog, we talked about The Dangers of the Rogue Franchisee and touched on what can happen when a franchisee is forced to take marketing and advertising initiatives into their own hands without guidance or support.. A big issue we consistently see associated with the dilution of a brand, can be credited to lack of support.

Branch managers and franchisees aren’t up scheming at night, thinking of ways to mess up the brand they signed on to represent. They’re up at night thinking of ways to increase business, build their audience and improve their bottom line. Be sure the people tasked with representing your brand have the support, information and resources they need to do their job successfully, while maintaining the integrity of the brand.

Streamline the Field Visit Process

Thoughtful, organized field visits are a huge part of protecting your brand across multiple locations. Each store needs this solid accountability, but more importantly, they need that human element of support and guidance. The field visit should be a learning experience for everyone, not just a review process.

Beyond the human element of field visits, the right technical support is essential. Field visits, or store reviews, don’t belong on clipboards or spreadsheets with fragments of notes. To make this process truly streamlined, collaborative and overall optimized, we suggest your field visit technology consist of the following functions:

• Robust reporting that enables users to spot trends, acknowledge successes and follow through on issues.
• Customizable reviews and scoring for your unique industry and organization.
• Cloud based for optimal collaboration with relevant and authorized users and instant access.
• A user-friendly and easy to navigate dashboard.
• The ability to capture and share images on a smart device to address issues and track follow through.

Track Performance

You cannot improve upon what you don’t measure. You also can’t encourage locations to continue to represent your brand well, or know when a store is consistently diluting or damaging your brand. Measure, measure, measure! Again, the right technology comes into play.

Let’s do away with the arbitrary, subjective review questions and scoring systems. Instead, use images and objective scoring to truly identify where your brand is being represented, and where you need to put in some work. Let’s be proactive about support and celebrate victories, instead of looking back on another bad review. For instance, if you’re tracking your location reviews optimally, you might see that your Omaha location goes down in a ball of flames every Q4. This is where technology meets collaboration to safeguard your brand. Now that you’ve spotted the trend, you can work with the right people to prevent it from happening for another year.

Yes, protecting your brand gets complicated as you expand, but if you make the right investment in the right tools and support, it becomes a lot easier. For more information on how the Action Card App can help you protect your hard earned brand, contact us today!.