Retail surgery: Sharing brand collateral with international franchise partners

Major overseas franchise partners often have their own systems and ways of working, and if they are not happy with the quality of what is being provided to them they will go off and do their own thing.

If you want your branding to be consistent across the world then you must supply marketing material in formats that are easy to use anywhere in the world. Concrete Group chief executive Tristan Rogers has provided web-based platforms to several UK retailers to allow them to work more effectively with partners, including sharing marketing and branding materials.

He says that ideally you should share every piece of relevant marketing material, though point-of-sale material is the most important if the look and feel of stores is to be recreated overseas. Once you use a system to share creative, then you can also gain visibility over what franchise partners are planning to do with it, and perhaps even introduce a sign-off process for any localisation of marketing material that takes place.

One knock-on benefit of this is that means the retailer still has a degree of control over the branding, without having to pay for all the collateral that is produced. Rogers points out that while “marketing support is often built into a franchise contract, production isn’t, and that is a significant cost”.

Rogers says that these same principles can apply to any other documents that need to be shared, such as design plans for new stores. You can draw and annotate CAD drawings online, and even allow partners to order store fixtures and fittings through a portal.