What is a Franchise Brand Story and Why is it important?

If you only take one point from this article, make it this one: Create your franchise story before you spend $1 on advertising your franchise. 

9 out of 10 franchises make the mistake of jumping into franchise advertising and sales activities before creating a franchise story and building franchise content. They learn the hard lesson by having to deal with low quality franchise leads or lack of such.

What is the purpose of a franchise story? 

The purpose of a franchise story is to communicate your unique value proposition to prospective franchisees and show them the reasons to become a franchisee. This story will be told by your sales people, by franchisees, through social media channels, on your website, in printed publications and PR messages.

Don’t let your sales people come up with their version of your franchise brand story. Create your own!

If you want to know why franchise stories are important and why most companies fail to create one, keep reading.

All of us have stories to tell, and people like stories. What people like more is a good story. A story that speaks to them, a story that they can see themselves in and can relate to your experiences. A powerful story and brand message is all you need to introduce your franchise business to the world. 

By telling this story you create what is called brand awareness. You make your potential franchisees know that your franchise exists. That’s it – it’s simple. 

Is the product more important than the franchise story?

The answer is – it depends who you ask. 

For franchise operations people, the product is more important because they have to deal with product related issues on a daily basis. 

For franchise marketers, the story is more important because a powerful story can generate a lot of interest and product issues can be dealt with later. 

As we are concerned with franchise marketing, the franchise story is key. 

Yes, the product is important, but you can spend a lot of time developing the product and no-one will ever learn about it if you do not tell your story. 

From my experience working with franchise companies and talking to franchisors and franchise business executives daily, we mutually agree that the story part is widely missed and here is why:

The majority of franchisors are successful business people, most of them own several businesses, but not many of them are marketers. They are successful business creators and business operators, not storytellers. 

Common Franchise Story Mistakes:

Imagine if I ask you to walk into a bar or coffee shop, look around, find an attractive person and ask her/him to marry you. Sounds crazy, right? Well, this is what a lot of franchise marketing stories look like, especially for emerging franchises, companies people have no idea about. 

Here’s an example: We are the fastest growing pizza franchise on the market! Learn more about how to own ABC pizza franchise. Call us today and learn how to become your own boss!

Sounds familiar? Not picking on pizza franchises, just replace ABC pizza with any other ABC franchise. 

You might say that a lot of brands, for example mobile phone providers, run bold ads specific to the offer they have. Well, before running offer ads those companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on engraving their company names into our brains – TV, radio, billboards, events, the list goes on and on about marketing tactics they use. 

In other words, all of us have been on several “dates” with these brands before they started chasing us asking to marry. 

BMW – The Ultimate Driving Machine. 

Verizon – Can You Hear Me Now? 

You get the point. 

The Good News!

You might think that to create franchise brand awareness, you need to spend a lot of money. 

Although you will have to spend money to create awareness about your franchise, there are media platforms that can do it quickly, effectively, and in line with your marketing budgets. 

The ball is in your court as a franchisor to make the decision about when and how you are going to tell the powerful story about your franchise. 

Keep in mind that the goal of a franchise story is not to generate franchise leads, but to build the base from which you will be generating franchise leads consistently. 

Now that we’ve gotten the strategic part out of the way, in my next article I will go over franchise marketing tactics creating a powerful story.