Discuss your core consumer marketing strategies and objectives. Like
most franchise businesses, it’s important
to maintain a strong partnership with
your franchise system. This means 1)
helping franchise owners market successfully within their local markets, and
2) providing larger, national/international programs to drive overall brand
value. The integration of these two
things—local support and a national/
international umbrella—results in an
effective, holistic marketing program.
How do you go about creating a “customer-centric” marketing and brand
philosophy? School of Rock strives to
be the best music educational brand in
the world. We continuously review all
areas of our business and ensure each
customer touch point lives up to that
goal: providing the best-in-class music
education experience for our students.
Describe your marketing team and
the role each plays. We are a lean, but
very effective team. We are an extremely
results-driven marketing organization.
This approach will continue as we continue to grow. We seek to bring on only
the most capable individuals who will
take pride with us in producing exceptional results.
When it comes to helping the brand
connect with franchise prospects,
why is it so important for the marketing department to have a “personal
touch”? With all marketing communications, the more personalized and
relevant the communication, the more
likely a franchise prospect will respond.
We want great franchise owners to join
this brand. Personal, targeted touches
help inspire and motivate these candidates to take interest in our brand.
How does this help your franchise
sales and development effort? This
targeted approach ultimately drives your
marketing ROI.
What ways/tools do you rely on to
do this? There’s a lot of analysis that
goes into our targeting and communication strategy. As an example, we create
analytical models to locate potential
franchise owners and expand business in
the most relevant markets to our brand.
68
Do today’s prospects expect more from
the franchise marketing department?
What, and how do you provide it? A
major benefit of a franchise business is
that franchisees join a model that’s been
established and replicated hundreds of
times—the operational model and the
marketing model are optimized and
templatized with the goal of providing the best approach for new owners
to achieve success. School of Rock has
opened more than 170 schools, which
has allowed us to become experts in these
processes. Because of this, expectations
from new prospects are understandably
high. And our goal is to live up to these
expectations. Since I joined the company
in mid-2015, we’ve begun implementing
a number of new programs that have
resulted in significant success. I’m even
more excited for 2016. We have a lot of
great initiatives in the pipe!
How is technology changing the
way franchise marketing is done in
terms of one-on-one contact? Digital
technologies provide many opportunities to better target our customers and
cust