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The study of franchising as a small business growth strategy is only weakly researched and understood. This preliminary, qualitative investigation examines the experiences of 17 operational and five “failed” franchises in the UK, in translating their business concepts into a franchise format. It reveals that small firms select franchising as a growth strategy for both economic and idiosyncratic reasons, but that economic reasons tend to prevail. The findings suggest that franchising is a viable growth strategy for small firms and that per se it creates few major problems for growth‐oriented small businesses. It is argued that further research is needed, particularly into the experiences of “failed” franchises and into the problems encountered by growing small firms who do not adopt franchising as a growth strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce strategy as a factor that explains when franchisors – through the franchisees they select – seek to replicate routines exactly versus allow local adaptation of routines.

Combined archival and survey data from 248 US and Canadian franchisors actively seeking franchisees were used to test hypotheses via structural equation modeling. The robustness of results was comprehensively explored.

As hypothesized, results suggest that franchisors pursuing plural form strategies select franchisees with traits that foster replication, such as prior managerial experience and the desire to become multi-outlet franchisees. Those franchisors pursuing turnkey strategies seek franchisees who exhibit a willingness to experiment and adapt. In contrast to expectations, plural form franchisors were more likely to seek franchisees with local market knowledge.

Strategy influences whether franchisors select franchisees who will replicate versus adapt organizational routines. The authors introduce strategy as a factor affecting the extent to which routines are replicated exactly versus adapted locally. For franchising research, they challenge prior theory by explaining why franchisors invest in franchisee selection rather than waiting for the best franchisees to self-select into franchising.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a franchising decision support system (FDSS) for future development planning by center positioning strategy formulation under a franchising business model.

The system makes use of data collected from the franchising business and external environment analysis for decision making in center positioning problems. The fuzzy logic approach is integrated into the system for analyzing the geographical market dynamics including profitability and competitiveness in the district concerned. To demonstrate the application of the proposed FDSS, a case study is conducted in a Hong Kong-based franchising private education center, i.e. Dr I-Kids Education Center.

The tailor made FDSS helps to facilitate the business operations of the franchising education center and develops a district positioning model for the centers located in the 18 districts of Hong Kong. The findings provide a solid foundation for marketing strategy and expansion direction formulation.

Due to the globalization of business, managing a growing franchising business model becomes challenging to the franchisor. In order to fully leverage the merits of the franchising system, an intelligent decision support model, focusing on making strategic development plans, is needed so as to expand the scale of business efficiently.

This study aims to examine the role of channel strategies in value appropriation and their effects on firm value with the consideration of situational factors.

An empirical study with secondary data is conducted in the context of public franchised channels. The authors use Entrepreneur Franchise Top 500 (2012) as the sampling frame and merge the data from three sources to create the final data set. A set of models are built to test the hypotheses in a hierarchical manner.

Value appropriation provides a solid rationale to link marketing channel strategies to firm value. Channel integration is an effective strategy driving intangible firm value. The influence of channel compression on intangible firm value depends on its interaction with other marketing environmental variables.

First, the sample size in this study is relatively small though these samples show high representativeness. Second, the empirical analysis in this study focuses on the franchised channels because of data availability.

Managers should consider the role of value appropriation when developing new channel strategies. A channel strategy deserves firm-level attention and resources because of its relevance to firm value. Managers should examine channel environment carefully and deploy internal resources to augment the potential of value appropriation strategies in channels.

This study is among the first to investigate the value relevance of marketing channel strategies from a value appropriation perspective. It identifies profit appropriation and resource appropriation as two mechanisms of value appropriation in marketing channels and uses these two processes to link channel integration and channel compression strategies with firm value.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a customer relationship mining system (CRMS) to analyze the data collected from franchisees and formulates a marketing strategy based on customer demand and behavior.

The system makes use of cloud technology to collect and manage data among the franchisees. An integrated approach of association rule mining and the neural network technique is adopted to investigate customer behavioral patterns and to forecast sales demand, respectively.

The significance and contribution of this paper are demonstrated by adopting the CRMS in the education industry in Hong Kong. The findings led to the identification of student learning intentions such as course preferences, and the forecasting of enrolment demand in terms of demand forecast. It is believed that better resources allocation can be achieved and an increase in customer satisfaction is foreseeable.

The proposed CRMS could be applied to various franchising industries for effective marketing strategy formulation. However, since the data in this study are extracted from a specific industry, modifications may be required before the CRMS can be applied to other franchising industries.

This study presents a new application to convert data into useful knowledge, and provides useful insights for delivering strategic promotional plans under a franchising business model. Through the pilot study conducted in a franchising education center, the results demonstrate that the proposed CRMS is valuable in providing effective promotion to attract more customers, better preparation in resources allocation and more standardized methods to formulate marketing strategies in the franchising industry.

This paper aims to offer a comprehensive systematic review of knowledge management (KM) in franchising literature over the past 29 years.

By means of bibliometric citation analysis, ISI Web of Science (WoS) database is used to analyze articles from 1990-2018. A total of 169 articles by 369 authors across 40 countries published in 113 journals from 200 institutions were clustered and examined through HistCites and VOSviewer.

The exploration of KM in franchising is associated with 3 factors: governance structure; performance outcome; and franchise network growth. The findings also reveal that KM in franchising is still an emerging discipline encompassing conflicting results which offer potential for future research.

Identified research gaps and contradicting views in the literature offer opportunities for researchers to contribute to this research domain by empirically testing the role of absorptive capacity, replication vs adaptation strategies and new franchising formats, such as micro/social franchising.

This study is unique in its examination of KM in franchising. It also highlights the value of knowledge in franchise chain performance.

This paper aims to demonstrate how franchising firms can manage system expansion by weathering the economic effects of a location (i.e. country-level economic cycles) by shifting their resources.

The authors use a comprehensive database of 151 US hybrid franchising organizations, including observations for the years between 2001 and 2008. Data analysis is conducted with count model panel data with a Poisson distribution.

The model reveals a curvilinear U-shaped relationship between location (i.e. economic cycles) and franchising expansion.

This study contributes to competitiveness literature by showing how franchising firms respond to changing local conditions.

Franchising has become a major driving force in the globalisation of service businesses. Likewise, international retailing has become an important feature of global distribution systems. This has been brought about through changing socio‐economic patterns, favourable political and cultural environments, and a shift from manufacturing to service based economies. Both developments have contributed to the globalisation of marketing activity. However, there remain fundamental conceptual inconsistencies in the literatures that explain the development of international retailing and the internationalisation of franchise operations. This paper considers the use of franchising in the internationalisation of retail operations and places the experience of retail operations that use the market entry strategy within the context of other franchising activity. The paper evaluates the literature on the internationalisation of retailing alongside the literature on franchising. It identifies the different perspectives that have emerged within the two literatures and conceptually reconciles the contradictions that exist.

International retailers are increasingly using franchising as a means of entering foreign markets. However, international retail franchising lacks a conceptual basis from which an explanation of the major elements of this activity can be generated. Agency theory and its major premises of information asymmetry, monitoring costs, moral hazard and opportunism, are introduced in an attempt to provide an initial effort at bridging this conceptual gap. The paper reviews international retailing and franchise research before explaining agency theory. A discussion follows on how agency theory can explain major elements of international franchise activity of retail firms such as the international retail franchise process and the operationalisation of the international retail franchise system.

The strategy of franchising has become an increasingly important growth option for firms operating in today’s highly competitive marketplace. This paper describes the present status of franchising and provides managers with practical, strategic guidance on its use. Three general forms of franchising have emerged which can be employed by the franchisor depending upon company objectives. It is also shown in this paper that a portfolio matrix model can act as a useful tool to aid decision‐makers in selecting and employing franchising strategies both domestically and in world markets.