Franchise Update Magazine Issue II, 2013 | Page 37

laborative effort that includes key stakeholders from finance, IT, merchandising,
and our field teams who represent our
owner base. It flows through a series of
cross-functional meetings for annual
planning, key seasons, and a regular biweekly meeting that addresses short-term
(within 90 days) tactical implementation.
How do you work with other internal departments, and how does
technology help? Very closely. Our

field leadership engages our franchisees
surrounding our marketing events. Our
merchant team builds offers and ads in
close coordination with my creative
team. We also work very closely with
our operations team to ensure all of our
promotions execute as planned when a
customer is at the register. Technology
plays a role in each of these relationships.
How do you manage costs and
budgets for the marketing department? We develop annual marketing

budgets for each format and that budget
is managed on a monthly and quarterly
basis. Some portions are planned far in
advance, while others may be used to react
quickly to market factors. Throughout
this process, attention is paid to storelevel investment to ensure that stores
are equally supported.
How do you measure marketing
results and effectiveness? In three

major ways. In all cases, it is effectiveness, as measured by a positive ROI on
the marketing spend based on incremental profit generated by the efforts.
On a large scale, we use complex multivariant models developed specifically for
our business based on large amounts of
store-level data. These models go well
beyond marketing investments to address pricing, weather, macroeconomic
factors, and a variety of other variables.
This type of analysis takes a great deal
of time and effort to complete but helps
us answer some of the larger and more
strategic questions.
For shorter-term testing, we leverage
the benefit of more than 1,200 physical
locations by running test and control
groups to better understand the impact
of our actions. We measure every new

thing we try. We are also able to leverage
this approach with our franchisee base.
We’ve run marketing tests in partnership
with our franchisees and have been able
to aggregate the results to show them
the impact we saw nationally—which
they would not be able to recognize in
a few stores. With our ability to create
large test and control groups, we are
able to help our franchisees differentiate between response and results. The
last type of analysis we do leverages
customer-level data, which allows us
to understand consumer reactions to
various efforts by constructing test and
control groups.
How have marketing strategies/
tools changed over the past decade, and how have you adapted?

The answer could be an entire book in
itself. There have been major changes
in media consumption and consumer
technology in the last five years alone.
To adapt, we are constantly testing and
evaluating our marketing choices and
using data to make decisions. However,
the biggest change is that the control of
the brand has irreversibly changed from
the CMO to the customer. The experience happens at the store level and the
customer is going to share that information instantly and permanently online.
Customers trust other customers more
than they trust the claims of companies.
Today you can review a restaurant online before you pay your bill. It used to
be believed that people would tell 10
people about a bad experience. Now a
bad experience is posted instantly for
everyone to see and these reviews are
showing up in search. To adapt to this,
we are paying close attention to the feedback we receive from our customers, not
only through our surveys, but through
ratings and reviews on sites like Yelp.
How is technology changing the
way franchise marketing is done
in terms of efficiencies? We are le-

veraging different technologies to allow
local customization of national marketing assets. One of the largest benefits we
saw from a new technology over the last
12 months was the ability for us to improve local discoverability in search for

our brick-and-mortar locations. We initially partnered with Yext simply to make
sure our basic information was correct
on a variety of third-party publishers.
It is extremely important to us that this
data is correct to maximize local search.
With half of consumers having GPSenabled smartphones, the importance of
being discovered locally is growing. The
concept of people going to your website
to find your locations is going to have
a shorter life than the Yellow Pages. It
may not be sexy digital technology, but
with estimates that 50 percent of all
listings have an error in name, address,
or phone number, it is necessary. This
year we are taking that relationship with
Yext to the next level with an increased
focus on managing online reputation at
the store level through a disciplined approach of monitoring customer reviews
across a variety of site s.
Are you using cloud technology
or other tools regularly? How?

We use cloud computing to manage the
data in “Shop Your Way Rewards,” our
loyalty program. We use it to append
endless member information together
from disparate sources. The more we
collectively know about the member
and store in the cloud, the better we
can contrast and compare it with similar
member behavior and identify what and
when they want to hear from us. Cloudbased technology allows us to quickly
slice and dice the information in many
ways, forming meaningful and actionable member segments. This allows us
to be more targeted and relevant in our
interactions with the customer.
How are you assisting your franchisees more quickly and efficiently?

The best way for us to quickly react to
the needs of our franchisees is to anticipate them. We are in close contact with
our franchisees through our field leadership and interact with them directly on a
regular basis as needs arise. We provide
a wide variety of customizable assets for
our franchisees, but we can’t anticipate
every need. If a new need arises and is
scalable across a sufficient number of
our franchisees, we will look to solve it
on an institutional level. n

Franchiseupdate I ssue I I , 2013 

35