Mark Vandegrift 
Welcome to the latest episode of FranSimple, the podcast designed to make the concepts of franchising simple. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and with me today is my brother, all around great guy, and today's interviewer, Steve Vandegrift. Steve, welcome.

Steve Vandegrift 
Thanks, Mark. I'm looking forward to making you work for a change. I'm just gonna ask questions and let you pontificate to our listeners. So, as by way of introduction, many business owners seek to expand through franchising. They often miss the importance of having a marketing system locked down. Marketing, however, will likely be the top factor between ultimately their success and failure. Since we covered the first leg of what we call the systematic stool on our last episode, which was the operations manual, let's move on to the marketing leg. We're gonna chat about why positioning aligns perfectly with franchising and why marketing is one of the three systems necessary for franchise success. So let's move on to the first question if you're ready. Innis Maggiore is America's number one positioning at a agency. How did you get that moniker and why does it matter?

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, as you can see on my wall here, we are America's number one positioning ad agency. And some people go, Well, how in the world can you claim that? Because anybody can say they're number one at anything. But Jack Trout, who started the original concept of positioning back in 1969 when he was at General Corporation and later hooked up with Al Reese. they published their original work, Positioning, The Battle for the Mind, in 1981. And they subsequently wrote about 22 books, I think, between the two of them and then Jack Trout by himself. And Jack Trout and Innis Maggiore had a great relationship. Dick Maggiore had formed that relationship back in the mid-80s when we brought Jack into town for our Canton Ad Federation to do a big event where Jack Trout talked about the concepts of positioning. And so we struck up a relationship with him back then. And we consulted with Jack multiple times on different accounts. And one of the things that was developed over time were the was the practice of positioning. And how does that vary from the books? Well, Jack always knew that he presented the concepts of positioning in his books. He never really got to the point where he laid out a curriculum or any kind of practice of how companies could arrive at their position. However, between Dick Maggiore and Lorraine Kessler, those two actually developed guidelines and principles and worksheets and things like that. And we developed a proprietary system in which we brought clients aboard and we helped develop the principles of positioning to the extent then one time when Jack Trout was in the room right next to me here, he was in with Dick Maggiore, and he and Jack just said, you know, you guys get this better than anyone. You gotta just claim you're the number one positioning at agency. Well, we didn't need to be told twice. And so we very quickly adopted that as really our differentiaton. It's been expressed different ways over the year. Positioning is our position was a little slogan we used for a while. But we finally decided we just need to claim America's number one positioning at agency. And we've been that for probably going on thirty years now, I would say, pretty close.

Steve Vandegrift 
That's awesome. So positioning's all about differentiation. And if that's the case, explain why you believe that matters in franchising.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, you know, it's interesting because what we do in the human mind is really incredible. We take in information, and as we're taking that information in, we put labels on it to kind of put it in a certain file drawer, if you will, in the mind. In marketing, we call those ladders. And we put different things in our brain in those file drawers. And anytime we need that information, our brain is able to pull out that file drawer and grab that information and bring it top of mind. The thing is, is that we have a filter on our brain that says if I've seen something before, get rid of it, like don't refile it. Or if it's something different, make sure that you file it in there. And the goal in branding is to be one of the top three brands considered in one of those file drawers. Well, you don't get in the file drawer unless you're different. So what they say is be number one or number two or do something new. And that has been the case for a long time. You're old enough to remember Hertz being number one, and they used OJ Simpson as their spokesperson, which, you know, later on turned out to be not a great move. But they were easily number one. And Avis came in and they said, you know what, we're not going to knock Hertz off of the top tier, but we're going to be a really good number two. So they became, we try harder. That was their slogan. And all of the commercials showed the long lines at Hertz, whereas Avis would show how they could walk customers to their car, show them how to get in, get it started, you know, how to really take care of your the car that they were about to rent. And then along comes Enterprise. And what did Enterprise do? We pick you up. So that was something new to the categories. You had number one Hertz, number two, Avis, number three, Enterprise. And that's really an example of why a difference matters. And you had tons of other auto-rental places, but they don't really stick in the brain. So as that applies to franchising, think about a franchise concept. Do you want something that's just like everyone else that anybody can replicate? Or do you truly want something differentiated that people are going to buy in to learn how to do that concept? You know, we had our last episode on operations and the operations manual. If nothing's unique in that operations manual, then it's going to be really easy for anyone else to replicate that. So why would they want to buy into your concept?So that's where franchising and marketing go hand in hand. You need that differentiation within the operations, but you have to express it or dramatize it through the marketing. Otherwise people don't know that you do have a differentiation.

Steve Vandegrift
Yeah, yeah. So you're really talking about something more than marketing. It seems to be a kind of a foundational strategy of the business. Can you explain how you typically engage clients to confirm the strategy and find their position?

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, I had mentioned we had formalized some practices well over you know 25 years now, almost 30 years. And we call it the appreciative discovery. And it's a process usually moderated in person, but we can do it remotely as well. We like the C-suite, you know, the CEO, all the C-suite, the sales team, and the marketing team to be in that meeting really because at the end of the day, the client's going to know how they stand out and what makes them different. But what's amazing to us is we see that while they might have been founded with a difference, what happens is different people come in and everyone lays a blanket over that difference. And all of a sudden you're inside the organization and you have no idea how the outside world perceives you. And so they forget what their difference was and where they stand apart from their competition. And it's amazing to us how many marketing firms say, well, competitor A is doing this, we need to do that. Competitor B is doing this, we need to do that. We would say quite the opposite. No, find the things that you do differently and express those and dive into those as deeply as you can. Because then it is truly anybody replicating you. So during the appreciative discovery, what we're really trying to do is take those blankets off that have been there coming in over the years and find that unique difference and raise that up. And some organizations, if they're fortunate, have more than one difference. They have two, three, four differences. And it's not bad. You can layer that on. If you think about Heinz, right, what do you think of Heinz for?Ketchup, right? So what's funny about them is they were known for pickles, but they found out very quickly that processing tomatoes and making something out of that was a better way to go. So Heinz very quickly became ketchup. Well, back in the day they had a commercial and it was trying to remember which singer it was. But you remember the song Anticipation? And it was all about that slow anticipation coming out of the bottle. And so they also owned the concept of thick. So Heinz equaled ketchup, but they also own the attribute of thick. So that's what we call layering your position. And anybody else that came along, you would have thought, man, they're not thick. In fact, Campbell soup tried to come out with it with a pasta sauce and we all think of Campbell soup as the cheap soup it's runny etc and so they came out with Campbell's soup sauce well guess what it didn't sell because do you really want pasta sauce that makes people think of like runny pasta sauce. No, it's all watery it's gross. So guess what they came out with? Ragu. Okay. So Ragu, if you look at the back of it, says a Campbell Soup Company. But they had to come out with a different brand name because they couldn't let people know that they were part of the Campbell soup product line. And so that's really the way that we have to think about positioning. It's really a challenge. It's something that we've been able to perfect over the years. And that appreciative discovery that we do with a client when we first onboard them is what's so critical to pull up that difference. And with franchising, I couldn't tell you how important that is because you start with the operations manual. If I knew what their difference was right up front, I'd be like seeding every difference I possibly could into that operations manual and just reminding through operations, you need to do it this way. Maybe it's not even because it might take a minute longer. But it might be something that elevates our difference to the outside world so that it brings value to the franchisees that are buying into it. And by the way, the customer who's actually buying your product. So those are really good reasons and that appreciative discovery, that's what it's all designed to do, is to bring up that strategy. So we start with strategy before we go to execution.

Steve Vandegrift 
Very good. So once you get the strategy, can you move directly into execution right away?

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. You know, one of the worst things about a consulting gig is you walk out of there and you have this big report. You know, it's in a D ring binder, four-inch binder, and it sits on a shelf and no one ever reads it. Our goal is to move you from the appreciative discovery right into execution. We try to do it within two to four weeks and the only reason there's a gap there is because we have to develop the creative that dramatizes the idea or the concept that comes out of the AD. We call it this. We say in the AD we need to get the right idea. And then when we go to execution, we need to get the idea right.

Steve Vandegrift 
I love that. So obviously a franchise business is a little more complex when it comes to the marketing system. So what are the areas of marketing that you focus on when it comes to a franchise or a franchise system?

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, it's interesting because franchising gets a little more complex than what I would say your typical expansion methods do. So we talk about the franchise marketing assets that help sell the franchise. What do I mean by that? Well, if I were walking into a discovery day and you're showing me all this great operations stuff, and then I say something like, well, how you how do you create a customer? Well, we're gonna work on the marketing later. Like, wouldn't that be a shock to your system as a franchisee prospect? You'd be going, what? And it's crazy because you know we work with smaller clients sometimes and they have one, two, three locations, and they've been there forever. And what we try to get them to understand is, you know, if we took your brand, picked it up out of whatever city you were founded in and move it over here a hundred miles away or 200 miles away. Do those people even know who you are? Do they know the brand? So you have all that uphill climb to do. Well, no one wants to be your testing ground for your marketing materials. So we tell franchise clients right up the right off the bat, the franchisors, you need to have marketing assets ready to go when you're ready to sell that franchise. So that's the first item. The next one is how am I going to do the marketing? You could say, Mr. Franchisee, you go ahead, you do all the marketing and take care of it. You know how to use Facebook and you know how to use TikTok. And you know, you'd be surprised how few franchisees actually understand that. So what we recommend typically is what we call a top-down marketing approach. And that keeps the brand intact. And it frees up the franchisor and the franchisee. Because guess what? Now we have a marketing system. The marketing system has already been put in place. The franchisee, they're told, okay, you spent X dollars a month. This is the way we want you to break it up. Boom, go and do it. So you can see how building the assets up front makes the franchisee more attracted to your concept because not only do you have an operational system, you have a marketing system, I can go, I can be free to run my operation. Franchise marketing takes care of itself. The final leg to that is then the franchise sales system. And that is once you're ready to sell franchises, what are you gonna do? Like, how do you tell someone about, I have a franchise company and I can sell it to people? Well, there's a lot to be done around that. You know, a lot of people say, I'm just gonna call up a franchise broker and they can sell all of this for me. Well, if you want to give 50% of your franchise fee away, that might be a great option for you. And you know, you help them through that, right? You certainly do that when you're helping clients set up their franchise system, but it's a surprise to me that people don't realize, I now have this thing called a business in a box, called a franchise that I'm gonna have to solicit to attract people to buy into my system. So that's another thing that we're helping. So it's multiple layers. It's getting your assets in order, and that includes like things like your website. That includes, you know, whether it be a TV spot or radio spot or your social or your digital marketing or whatever it may be. And then having an ongoing program for the franchisees. And then, by the way, we have to have some kind of system in place to sell your actual franchise concept. Now I know we're gonna get into the franchise sales system. That'll be on our next episode, and you'll I'll get to interview you again. but before that, we have to understand there's multiple tiers that are involved or layers that are involved in selling a franchise.

Steve Vandegrift 
Very, very true. And obviously to most of us that sounds pretty complex. So do most franchisors elect to handle it themselves?

Mark Vandegrift 
I think they do because they look at it as an expense. And what we try to get franchisors to understand is look, you're investing in setting up an operation system that is documented so that you can sell that business in a box. But part of that has to be marketing. So you need to set aside dollars before you're ready to sell your franchise concept. You have to set aside those dollars to get your marketing in order. Franchise businesses and franchisors are very rarely good at marketing. They're usually really good at operations. And they know that because they've said, hey, I got something here that I can duplicate. It's a business in a box. I want someone to know about it. I've had people walk in and say how great we are and we should be franchising this idea, but they never had to worry about the marketing side of it. And so we find that you know you're either great at operations, you're great at marketing. It's rare that a franchisor is good at both. And there's other components to that. So it's not just those two things. We're gonna talk about the franchise sales system on the next episode, as I just noted, but do you have capabilities in all three of those legs of the stool? The operations, the marketing, and the franchise sales. And I would say I have rarely rarely met a franchisor that is good at all three things.

Steve Vandegrift 
So true, so true. And obviously they learn a lot going through the process. So you made a lot of good points here and likely have our listeners' brains spinning. So please explain where you typically start when evaluating the brand of one of our new franchise clients.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, what we typically see, and this isn't 100% of the time, but I would say 75% of the time, most clients walk in, they would have what I would call local or regional brand perception. And that means that they get by because they're local, they've been there forever, and people love them for who they are. And they never say, Hey, your logo looks a little jank, or and I really can't read your logo, or why do you have a bear for your logo and you're selling, you know, something totally unrelated to bears? it it's what we end up having to do is trying to move them up a notch or several notches to get to a national or a global level so that the perception when a franchise e-prospect walks in, they look at it and they almost know already that the marketing's in place. You know, it's funny how a website and a logo, just those two things, can attract or repel franchisee prospects. We've had programs where we've told a client, hey, your logo really needs work. It's not readable, it's not at the level we need, and your website's not great. You know, we've seen some that are all black and they have all white lettering and they look like 1995 called and they want their website back. And we've made the comment, you really need to get that in the order. And they've said, Well, we we'll invest in that once we get two or three or four franchises sold. Well, the problem is, is we drive tons of traffic to their franchise pages and people are not responding. Like, we'll have a hundred people show up on the franchisee page, no one fills out the form. Well, that's because they're perceiving the brand to not be at a level that they're comfortable with. Like you know, it'd be like having pictures of food that are taken by a kid that has already dug into their food and it looks sloppy and messy, or having a professional food stylist on hand to make sure the photographer who understands food is taking these gorgeous pictures. People perceive that difference and so what we're trying to do when we talk about the marketing system is we're trying to raise them up so that their job's easier when they're trying to sell the franchise concept. Otherwise, you get all these leads in, you waste it. And that's spent a lot of money to get those leads because if it's pay per click or it's a franchise directory, every lead that you get in is going to cost you that amount of money. And if they're repelled by your marketing, your logo and your and your website, you know, you've lost a really good potential prospect there.

Steve Vandegrift 
That's right. Yeah. Well, as you know, we have a few clients that they come to us, they want the legal, the operations, the sales side of the development handled, but they they feel that they can do their own marketing. So do you find that this is a good approach and what level of work does it require from a franchise or that wants to handle it themselves?

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, you talked on this a little bit in the operations on our last episode. If you're gonna get into franchising, you have to think about staffing for franchising. You know? If you don't have a marketing department, think about all the requests that are going to come in from franchisees that say, I want this, or I saw I have an opportunity to do a billboard, or I have an opportunity to do a local print ad and if we're coming up on fall football, you know, sports programs. I need a print ad for that, or I need some social media posts, and I need this. Well, if the business concept has not thought about staffing for fulfilling franchisee requests, you're going to be in a world of hurt. And that applies to operations as much as it does marketing. You know, each day brings new requests, new marketing opportunities, marketing technology is changing, so you have to keep up with that, it's just tough to bring that in-house unless the organization already has a fairly well-established marketing department. And even then, you know, it can become a bit overwhelming if the expectations of shifting from a marketing, from marketing a single concept or maybe a couple locations to an agency model are not understood. So that's why we've we've really helped a lot of our franchise companies our clients shift to a top-down model because if they find they can't do it, they can shift that over to a resource like Innis Maggiore, where we can handle all that. We have 150 active clients at any given time. So for us to be able to do handle a franchise concept and then let's say 25 or 30 franchisees, that's second nature to us. We're like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, request comes in, we do our thing. And if we need to coordinate that through the franchisor no problem. We do that every single day. So it really is important before you decide to franchise on the marketing side. One, do I have marketing in-house? Two, if I have marketing in-house, are they going to be able to shift their mindset from working on one or two locations to potentially working on 20 to 30 to 40 to 50? Because that's what you're aspiring to.

Steve Vandegrift
Yep, so true. And if they do bottom up marketing, they need to get the franchisees have to get approval from the corporate office to do anything that hasn't already been approved. So how much time is involved in that process too? Top down, I find completely eliminates that, which is great. So last two questions. they're my favorites because you always challenge me with them on each episode. So what is the biggest mistake that franchisers make when it comes to the marketing system?

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, I touched on it, but I'm just gonna be really frank. I think that probably at the 75 to 80 percent mark, like I said before, have an inability to understand what the power of a brand is. They get to the marketing side and they go, I can save money here. I don't need to invest in that. I already am successful. I have one or two locations and we're gonna duplicate this sucker and everybody's gonna love it. Well, if the resources aren't there for marketing, you may want to reconsider whether now is the time to franchise. we see that it kind of goes to that movie. What's it called? Failure to launch. I think Matthew McConaughey maybe was in that one. It's no different than that. You get this beautiful business in a box ready to go, and it's crickets. And it's like, you know, why aren't people buying into my concept? Well, one, it may be you didn't differentiate enough and they're going away and saying, I could do that myself. Or two, the brand perception is not there. We've talked about ugly logos and ugly websites and things, but even the way you talk about marketing and when they ask the question, how do I create a customer to you, the franchise or and you go, that's a problem. And so that really, if I could help people down a path of 10 years and say, look at this beautiful brand we created and the value that that brand has. That would be my ultimate, I guess, wish where I could just snap a finger and say, please understand the value of a brand.

Steve Vandegrift 
Yeah, yeah, and it's so true. so let's go one more question. If you could give one piece of advice to a business owner preparing to franchise, what would it be regarding their marketing system?

Mark Vandegrift
So I just touched on it, I probably gave it away a little bit, but I would say if you're considering franchising, you need to be able to confidently answer the question. If a franchisee prospect walks in and says, How will you, meaning Mr. Franchisor, create a customer for me? And if you can't answer that question, you need to work hard to decide how you will answer that question. And be ready to answer that question because it's going to come.

Steve Vandegrift 
That is so true. And I believe you and I have discussed this, but top three questions. One of them is how do you create a client or customer? How do you help me drive people to my business? Certainly one's profitability, but the marketing question is right behind it. So Mark, you gave some great advice today. I appreciate it. I kind of like this role truthfully, a little better than when I'm in the hot seat. So thanks for playing along today and letting me be the interviewer. Again, we have these conversations with our clients all the time. I just felt it would be a good podcast to share. But I know I can't close out the episode with the same flair as you. So please, Mark, take it from here.

Mark Vandegrift 
Thanks, Steve. It certainly is easier to ask the questions, isn't it?

Steve Vandegrift 
It definitely is.

Mark Vandegrift 
But thanks for letting me steal your soapbox for one episode to explain the value of marketing in the franchising world. It really can't be understated, but it unfortunately is often overlooked. So let's wrap up today's episode of FranSimple. Thanks for joining us. And as always, please like, share, subscribe, subscribe, subscribe to FranSimple, the podcast designed to make the concepts of franchising simple. And until next episode, may your business expand through the power of franchising.