How Much Is Poor Brand Consistency Really Costing You?

You may not realize it, but poor brand consistency WILL cost you. Poor brand consistency costs you valuable time, resources and can even add up to a bad customer experience. If that wasn’t enough, poor brand consistency, in many ways, can lead to the free reign of your franchise by your franchisees and poor franchise development and sales.  

If you break down the details, you realize how quickly everything adds up.

POOR BRAND CONSISTENCY LEADS TO POOR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES

Poor customer experiences lead to fewer people frequenting your locations, which leads to fewer sales, less revenue, and ultimately, poor overall franchise performance.

Obviously, your goal is to get customers in the door. If your brand is inconsistent, the customer is going to have a different experience at each location. For example, if you are a food-based franchise, if one of your restaurants cooks their burgers one way, but another makes them completely different, the customer is going to have an inconsistent experience, when they were expecting to get the same thing.

This impacts the performance of each individual franchisee and ultimately overall revenue for the franchise.

FRANCHISEE AUTONOMY LEADS TO BRAND INCONSISTENCY AND ADDITIONAL COSTS

If you aren’t communicating a consistent message through your franchisees, a lot of details will be left up to them to figure out and carry out on their own.

We’ll use the food-based franchise example again. Depending upon the time of year, a franchise might be focused on holiday catering. If you are leaving something like that up to the franchisee, without a focused way to roll out the promotion and manage the event, you are risking the possibility of those offers not being properly communicated to the customer.

This lack of standardization, and inability to streamline and manage promotions and offers across all of your franchise locations, can also lead to considerable additional costs for your franchise.

POOR BRAND CONSISTENCY LEADS TO POOR FRANCHISE DEVELOPMENT AND SALES

Brand management extends beyond company communications and customer engagement with a direct impact on other crucial areas of franchising, including franchise development. People don’t necessarily buy a product, but they buy into a brand. Poor and inconsistent brand management sets off a domino effect that makes it difficult to attract interested and qualified franchisees.

With potentially hundreds or thousands of franchisees, achieving brand consistency is a difficult, but important task. Inconsistencies in communication, offers, signage and customer engagement can lead to a poor brand experience and lost customers. This all leads to a deteriorated brand with significant peaks and valleys in performance from one franchisee to the next.

As a result, a potential franchisee isn’t going to want to represent a brand that is suffering from inconsistent performance and a lack of customer loyalty. If this is the case, it becomes a challenge for emerging brands to attract talented franchisees and developers, resulting in difficulties gaining traction and growth.