Franchisees are at odds over marketing strategies. How can you resolve their conflicts effectively?

Franchise owners offer a great perspective because they are in the trenches daily. They hear what the clients/end users need and want. I owned a franchise for 24 years and served on the OAC (Owner Advisory Council). Other franchise owners (260+ owners in SE) would share ideas with me, and I was 1 of 7 OAC reps who shared ideas with the franchisor. We had monthly meetings and then in-person meetings annually. This practice still takes place today!

Listening actively & ensuring every franchisee has an opportunity to have a voice is critical. I once had the pleasure of working for Mike O'Driscoll, former National Sales Leader for Jaguar Cars, in a Ford Motor Company Region in Washington DC. Mike taught me that at each dealer meeting we should have a U shaped table, with each dealer able to see the others. He would always ask each & every dealer to speak his mind. So they had a chance to have a voice. If they wanted to, they could tell us, the franchisor, what we needed to hear, & we could get unfettered access to market feedback & reality. It also forced the important issues to the fore. We'd lunch too, enabling the minor issues to surface also. This approach ensured vital dialogue.

We ensured we built alignment around centalized goals when we launched the Nissan & Infiniti Internet Certification Program. The goals were sell more units, make more money, & deliver a better more consistent brand experience, so all won. Customer, dealer, OEM. We then measured data on process & delivered resources to enable improvement, & measured & communicated. We fed the process with Dealer Advisory Board input, & then used return-on-spend based metrics to showcase opportunity that mattered to each dealership team. We also put objectives on the field sales reps performance reviews. This fostered unity & cooperation, & alignment through the tiers (OEM, region, & dealer) in service of the brand & customer. It yielded more sales & Profit.

I love the topic of flexible frameworks. I hated how every vendor wanted to ram one solution through the OEM and some neophyte OEM managers, especially ones who hadn't worked in the field with the franchisees who had their capital, reputation, & legacies on the line, to make their profit objectives. It had nothing to do really with enabling the network to succeed, the dealer, the customer, & the brand. So I always got the voice of the dealer, developed process & data standards, & certified dealer solutions to support them, so I got the data I needed to move the overall dealer body & customer experience forward, while ensuring supplier competition ensured no lethargy, & dealer issues were addressed. To this day I'm a franchisor/-ee advocate.

Mediating fairly starts from my perspective that a win-win-win must be sought always. The trick then is to balance short- vs. medium- vs. long-term objectives, & communicate how they interrelate, so the franchisee can understand & buy into a decision on his/her terms, albeit with me as franchisor, being very clear about my POV & desired direction for the collaboration. At day's, ensuring the franchisee understands that not only are there short-term interests at stake, but there were long-term as well, was key. Stepping out of one's own shoes & heuristics & into the other's, is absolutely critical here. Because that enables envisioning the win-win-win, & empathy, that carries a warmth forward, enabling better win-win-win outcomes.