Corporate Groups & Enterprises
Marketing for organisations where deciding and doing are separate jobs
Franchises, multi-site groups and large enterprises share one structural condition: the people who approve marketing are not the people who execute it. Everything difficult about this sector comes out of that gap.
The category
What these businesses have in common
The businesses grouped here have very little in common commercially. A three-hundred-outlet franchise, a regional group with eleven sites and a listed company with four business units sell different things to different people at wildly different prices.
What they share is a structure. Marketing is decided in one place and carried out in another, so the difficulty is rarely the idea and almost always the distance between the two. Work that ignores the distance produces agreement in the room and nothing on the ground.
These pages are written to that condition. They are about who can be told what, who has to be convinced, what the approval chain will actually pass, and what the numbers have to look like before anyone will act on them.
Where they split
And where a single strategy stops working
These differences are the reason the pages below are written separately rather than as one page with the business type swapped out.
- A franchisor persuades and an enterprise directs, and those need completely different levers. Persuasion runs on contract terms, incentives and making the central option obviously better than the local alternative. Direction runs on mandate, budget authority and executive sponsorship, and it produces compliance rather than commitment.
- The money flows in opposite directions. A franchise advertising fund is money collected from independent owners who are entitled to ask what it bought, which makes accountability a contractual matter. An enterprise budget is allocated downward from a central pool, and the argument is about internal allocation rather than justification to contributors.
- The legal exposure is not the same shape. A franchisor operates under disclosure legislation that constrains what may be said to prospective franchisees, and can be answerable for claims a franchisee makes locally. An enterprise is constrained by sector regulators, advertising standards, accessibility obligations in procurement, and in listed companies by what may be said about future performance.
- Speed limits differ in kind. A franchise system can move quickly wherever owners agree and stalls completely where they do not, so progress is uneven across the network. An enterprise moves at the pace of its slowest required approver even when everybody agrees, so progress is even and slow.
Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal