Episode # 78

How do even the big brands get location strategy wrong at times when placing franchises into the market?

We unpack what went wrong in three very different real-life scenarios to gain insight into how it can happen and why.

In Episode #78 - As a leading authority on location data and its impact on consumption behaviours, Vanessa Wilmot, MD of geotech  talks us through some specific situations she has been directly involved in understanding the why, then going about fixing the problem for franchise brand.

We dig deep on these three scenarios;

A food brand of 50-80 locations that thought it was appealing to a much more on-trend type of consumer segment and adopted a location strategy around that, only to find the locations were failing within a year or so.

A destination larger retail store that made the significant mistake of enticing early investors into the franchise with the allocation of exclusive territories that were so large that four stores could fit in them than the single store they had. Unraveling this took around 10 years.

A Perth dominant food rand that looked to replicate that success in the Eastern seaboard market and failed to adapt their offer and approach enough or at all from the WA based offer, only to have very limited penetration.

Vanessa details ways to identify these issues before they happen, what to learn from the scenarios, and gives a kind of check list of things to be considering when making such location decisions.

0:00 Intro

0:39 How often Franchise brands get locations wrong

1:51 The types of things that gone wrong in location selection, starting with not doing research to start

2:29 Other thing that goes wrong is giving away too big or too small territories

03:04 Examples of scenarios gone wrong first scenario, medium growth stage food brand with 50-80 stores 

06:48 How do brands make such mistakes 

07:29 Next scenario a territory destination based brand putting one store exclusively in a territory with 30 stores at the time giving huge territories  - 10 years to unwind the mistake

12:03 Next scenario in a food brand focused on Western Australia that dominates that region but trying to replicate that in eastern Australia

14:24 Seeing quite a difference between Melbourne and Sydney and how hard Sydney is to crack for many brands

15:36 The processes to solve the location puzzle 

16:35 Wrap up

Podcast Produced by: The Franchise Business HUB

Listen or Watch on SPOTIFY HERE | Listen or Watch on Apple Podcasts HERE

Listen or Watch on Amazon Music HERE