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Your brand is essential to maintain a recognizable presence in the marketplace, so making sure that all of your franchisees use consistent branding across all their marketing and promotional platforms is a great way to build customer trust and achieve success.
Your franchise's brand goes beyond its logo, but this is an important place to start as it will be the core memory that consumers will associate with your brand at all of its locations and in all of its online communications. Therefore, you should protect it with a trademark and mandate its use by franchisees at all times.
It is vital that your franchisees receive appropriate training to understand the importance of brand consistency in all of their communications. This extends beyond the use of the logo to elements such as font styles and sizes, color schemes, tone of voice and the type of language used. They must also be appropriately briefed on the importance of checking that logos, font and style are appropriate in all communications and that no blurring, size discrepancies or unusual language appears that could confuse potential consumers.
Formalize this training through brand guidelines that your franchisees can refer back to at any point. This will detail the way in which the logo can be used, an approved font library, the color combinations that the brand allows, and any other specific information that is relevant to the way you want your franchisees to communicate in the public marketplace.
Your franchisees must understand and commit to your business' mission and support you in achieving your objectives. This includes demonstrating the brand's core values in everything they do. You should detail your core values, review them regularly and ensure that you remain true to them. They will be the cultural glue that will bind your franchise enterprise to its people.
Finally, to ensure consistency, you will need to regularly monitor the activities of your franchisees to ensure they are applying your guidelines and branding correctly and take early corrective action when needed. Making sure that your franchisees remain in compliance with your rules enables you to maintain a cohesive brand identity and implement targeted upskilling and further training as needed on an ad hoc or formal basis.
In addition to checking for non-compliance, make sure that you reward excellence. In cases where a franchisee is enhancing your brand identity through continuous and correct use of your trademarked logo and consistent messaging, find a way to publicly recognize them. This will increase their loyalty, allow others to understand what is required of them, and inspire the whole franchise network to strive for excellence.
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