Managing the Franchised Brand: The Franchisees’ Perspective

Brands and their management have become a focal point of marketing practice and academic study in recent years. There has been a great deal of controversy and discussion regarding what brands are, what they do, how they can be valued and how they should be managed.1,2,3 As observers such as Tom Peters4 admonish one to ‘Brand, Brand, Brand!’, some corporations are questioning the wisdom of entrusting what may be their most critical assets to anyone but senior managers.5 The future of brands has been questioned by some authors,6,7 but others have sought to reaffirm their centrality,8–10 implicitly asking, ‘What is the point of marketing without brands?’ Managers are admonished in an astonishing range of articles and popular texts to manage brands, yet most of these exhortations focus on important, but relatively isolated, aspects of overall brand management.