Franchise Update Magazine Issue III, 2016 | Page 69

company. “We’ve done well. We’ve been
lucky, made good decisions, and had good
intuition,” he says. However, he adds,
“That is not scalable. It is not going to
get this brand to 1,000 locations. What
I have embraced, what I try to tell my
team to embrace, and what I encourage
other CEOs of small
to mid-sized companies to consider, is
that if you really want
to scale, you have to
embrace the concept
that your intuition is
going to get you only
so far. You may know
your business better
than anyone else, but
you must have data to
support what it is you
want to do.”
Franchisors are
finding that while it’s
one thing to collect
and analyze data, it’s
what you do with it Rich Hope
that matters. “The
mistake people make is that they look at
the data, but they haven’t honed in on what
is the question,” says Rotondo. “Before
you go get the data, make sure everyone
is aligned on what the problem is you are
trying to solve, what the question is you
are trying to answer. Sometimes that is a
step that gets missed.”
Also, he says, with the rapid-fire development of new technologies, apps, and
third parties offering “big data” solutions,
brands are grappling with how to turn
consumer information into actionable
insights and avoid getting caught up in
the analysis paralysis trap while the competition marches on.
Start making sense
Jersey Mike’s Subs, with 1,500 locations
open and under development, is in the
process of consolidating the chain’s reward, texting, online ordering, and email
databases to create customer profiles and
leverage powerful amounts of information and point-of-sale data. The brand’s
Shore Points Rewards program accounts
for 30 percent of its customers and 33
percent of sales. The brand’s email database tops 1.4 million, and the company
recently wrapped up a two-month campaign designed to entice new and existing

customers to create an online account in
exchange for a free sandwich.
“Gathering the data is not so difficult,” says Rich Hope, Jersey Mike’s chief
marketing officer. “Harnessing, making
sense out of the data, and acting upon it
in some way, in terms of marketing, becomes trickier. That
is what we are doing
now.”
The move to
bring together all the
chain’s digital sources will allow Jersey
Mike’s to know their
customers more intimately and serve
up offers based on
their preferences, says
Hope. The resulting
database marketing is
akin to a modern-day
coupon, a strategy
that appeals to franchisees.
“It’s incredibly
trackable and quantifiable,” says Hope. “You can look at any
single offer you do or any group of people
you send to and analyze if it worked or
didn’t work, based on
your benchmarks. It’s Chad Graham
analytically driven.
Every single thing
can be looked at and
reviewed. That is the
beauty of it.”
While learning
what and when they
order is ultimately
designed to better serve customers, collecting that
information can
be a headache that
both franchisors and
franchisees must be
ready to handle, says
Hope. “When you
do something that
involves technology, as simple as you try
to make it, people aren’t always going
to get the process. So whenever you do
anything like that, you better be ready
on the customer relations side because
there are going to be questions—and
you need to be able to handle those
questions.”

Data for the system
While consumer