🚀 Want the full picture on how AI, automation, and local marketing will shape franchise growth next year? 👉 Download the Free 2026 Franchise Marketing Guidebook to explore 10 major trends and insights from 15 franchise leaders.

Your best “storefront” might not be a literal storefront or your website. Nowadays, 54% of consumers research products on social platforms before purchasing. On 2026’s terms, it’s highly likely that your customer’s first impression of your brand will look be something like:

• A TikTok filmed between classes

• A Reel featuring a franchisee mid-laugh

• A 12-second clip that feels real, human and fun

As Jami Stigliano, the Founder and CEO of DivaDance, puts it in Flamel’s 2026 Franchise Marketing Guidebook:

“Franchise brands will evolve beyond polished graphics and pivot almost entirely toward short-form, personality-driven content.

TikToks and Reels will become the new storefronts—places where authenticity, humor and storytelling drive brand loyalty.

The future of franchise marketing will belong to brands that humanize their teams (and franchisees!) and turn everyday moments into shareable, story-driven entertainment.”

Her thesis is simple: The franchise brands that win won’t look the most polished, but they’ll feel the most human.

Why Polished Franchise Content Alone Doesn’t Cut It

For years, franchise marketing has optimized for:

• Perfect graphics

• Brand-safe templates

• HQ-approved visuals

But short-form platforms reward something else entirely, placing priorities on:

• Faces over fonts

• Energy over perfection

• Stories over slogans

This shift is already happening. Short-form video on social media (TikTok, Reels, Shorts) is one of the highest‑impact formats for driving engagement. In fact, it generates about 2.5X more engagement than long‑form video on social platforms, and around 66% of marketers say short‑form delivers the highest engagement rate of any content type. As a result, authenticity has become a real competitive advantage for all brands. And franchises’ multi-location social profiles put both zees and zors in a unique position to authentically connect with their own communities and potential customers.

The “New Storefront,” Explained by Jami Stigliano

In the 2026 Franchise Marketing Guidebook, Jami’s insight breaks down into three practical pillars franchises can apply immediately.

Franchise Marketing Pillar #1: Personality > Polish

Customers want vibes, not visual-consistency demonstrations.

Over-produced content signals “brand.” Personality signals a potential for belonging, which is critical when building a small, community-focused business.

Franchise Marketing Pillar #2: People Are the Brand

The most trusted faces people see on social media are:

• Franchisees

• Instructors

• Front-desk staff

• Coaches

• And customers!

People are dramatically more likely to make a purchase when they see a recommendation from someone they can relate to and trust. Consumers are up to 80% “more likely to purchase” when they see content and recommendations from real people they actually know and identify with.

Franchise Marketing Pillar #3: Everyday Moments = Content Gold

You likely feel like this is true, but data proves it! Audiences strongly prefer authentic, “imperfect” short‑form video over heavily staged, polished content and that this authenticity drives higher engagement and purchase intent. Stats show that videos under 90 seconds can hold around 50–70% of viewers’ attention to the end, especially when they feel like real moments rather than ads.

So what can these ultra-attention-retaining videos look like?

• Behind-the-scenes clips

• Day-in-the-life videos

• Small wins

• Testimonial-style clips

• Community moments

So get inspired by your staff! Encourage customers to share their experiences! And ultimately, think of your TikTok and Reels strategy as being story-driven entertainment, rather than simply “posting for posting’s sake.”

Why Short Form Video Matters Specifically for Franchise & Multi-Location Brands

Jami’s perspective is especially powerful because she’s scaled a people-powered brand. DivaDance’s franchise marketing approach blends community-driven storytelling with tech-forward localized marketing strategies.

You can’t scale community-driven storytelling by controlling it from the top down, because no two communities are the same. Every franchise location is shaped by different owners, teams, customers, neighborhoods and rhythms of daily life. When franchisors try to force one voice, one script or one “approved” version of a story, the result feels flat and disconnected from the people it’s meant to reach. The brands that scale successfully understand that community relevance doesn’t come from tighter control, but from trust. 

By empowering franchisees to share the real stories of their own businesses, customers and local moments—within clear brand guardrails—franchisors unlock marketing that feels authentic everywhere at once. 

That’s how community-driven storytelling scales: Through many human voices telling one shared brand story.

Practical Takeaways: How Franchises Can Create Engaging Short-Form Video in 2026

First, reframe your thinking. While it may feel risky to allow franchisees to create and share their own video content, keep in mind that:

• Low-energy content is riskier than imperfect content.

• Silence is less effective than experimentation.

• Customers forgive messiness, but not invisibility.

Inspired by Jami’s insights and Flamel’s Franchise Marketing Guidebook, franchise brands can move fast, retain brand control and feel human at the same time. Embrace simple strategies like:

• 🎥 Building simple short-form frameworks (not rigid scripts)

• 🧍‍♀️ Spotlighting real people weekly

• 📱 Designomg for vertical video (keep captions on and keep videos under 60 seconds)

• 🤖 Using AI for editing and ideation, but keeping humans in the loop

• 🧠 Training franchisees on storytelling, not “content rules”

If you want some inspiration on how other franchise brands are doing this, check out our guide 5 Franchise Brands Absolutely Crushing It on TikTok (And What You Can Learn From Them).

2026 Belongs to Authentic Brands, Only

AI can generate content. Automation can scale distribution. True connection, however, will always and only come from the real people across your franchise network.

Feeling excited to upgrade your franchise marketing in 2026? This post is part of a larger series highlighting insights from leaders featured in the 2026 Franchise Marketing Guidebook, including our recent piece inspired by Lynn Blashford, CMO of White Castle.

👉 Download the free Guidebook here to explore:

• Jami Stigliano’s full perspective

• Insights from 14 other franchise executives

• Practical tools to turn personality into performance

This year’s winning brands won’t just show up everywhere. They’ll show up as themselves.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are make-or-break moments for wellness and self-care brands. Costs spike. Competition intensifies. Buying windows shrink.

MassageLuXe is a national massage franchise, and BFCM’s challenges were amplified by:

• 100+ locations in different markets

• Their need for hyper-local relevance

• Reliable brand compliance

• Franchisee confidence and buy-in

Traditional ad workflows and manual builds were arduous. Constant budget adjustments, localized creative revisions and delayed reporting created risk during the most important week of the year. When their team implemented Flamel.AI though, their work was streamlined and their results were incredible.

The Solution: Flamel AI Social Ad Playbooks

To scale without sacrificing performance, the brand deployed Flamel AI’s Social Ad Playbooks. Playbooks are purpose-built for franchise advertising, allowing franchisees to launch fully-localized campaigns in just one click.

What MassageLuXe launched:

• 3 promotional pricing tracks, each composed of 3 targeted campaigns

• Promotions focused on BFCM pricing, memberships and limited-time self-care offers

How it worked:

• Corporate built campaigns once using Flamel Playbooks

• Franchisees opted in with one click

• Ads automatically localized by city, franchisee-selected promotion, custom budgets per location and unique audience targeting

• Creative remained centrally controlled

Built-in advantages:

• Brand-approved creative

• Local audience targeting

• Centralized spend control via Flamel’s Command Center

• Real-time analytics, customized for MassageLuXe

• Custom CRM integration tying ads directly to revenue

Execution at Scale, Faster Than Ever

Instead of spending weeks building and managing campaigns, MassageLuXe’s marketing team focused on:

• Performance optimization

• Budget efficiency

• Creative testing

Ryan Tiemeyer, Digital Marketing Specialist, explains:

“Flamel changed the game for us. Launching Black Friday ads used to take me close to two weeks, because I had to build, duplicate, adjust and troubleshoot campaigns for every single location. With Flamel AI, we built one campaign and launched it to all locations and franchisees opted in with their budget. That alone was a huge shift for us.

From there, everything ran through the Command Center. I could adjust budgets, monitor performance and optimize in real time without jumping between accounts. Franchisees could immediately see results for their locations, which made reporting easier than the past!

From an execution standpoint, this completely changed how we operate. Watching our ROI at this spend level was incredible and honestly something you just do not see in most Meta environments. 

It feels like Flamel AI built this specifically to work for us, and it shows. The team at Flamel has been amazing to work with and any suggestions to be added into the platform has been added! The efficiency, scalability and performance have been amazing with Flamel!”

Full-Scale, Incredible Results

Performance:

• 68+ million impressions

• Nearly 4 million measurable outcomes

• 5.8% result rate

Financial Impact:

• Nearly $3M projected profit

• +512% ROI

• $5.12 in projected profit for every $1 spent

Kristen Pechacek, MassageLuXe’s President & CEO, shares:

“For us, the most exciting part of this campaign was both the revenue and how we achieved it. Turning our advertising investment into projected millions in profit at this scale is extraordinary. Flamel.AI gave us the infrastructure to launch hyper-local campaigns across our entire system with total brand control. Our franchisees felt confident, our team stayed agile and the results exceeded anything we’ve seen from holiday campaigns before.”

Why These Results Are So Rare at This Scale

When running their very best campaigns, franchise brands may achieve a high ROI at low spend or massive reach with declining efficiency

When partnering with Flamel.ai, MassageLuXe achieved both and more, with:

• Extensive reach of over 68M impressions

• Elite efficiency with a 512% ROI

• Massive time savings

Kristen highlights just how dramatic the operational impact was:

“During BFCM, we normally spend weeks building, localizing and managing campaigns across dozens of locations. With Flamel, that work was essentially eliminated. What used to take our team hundreds of hours happened automatically, which let us focus on performance, instead of production.”

Franchisee & Team Impact

Flamel.ai granted MassageLuXe franchisees:

• One-click access to high-performing national campaigns

• Fully localized ad creative and audience targeting

• Real-time visibility into their awareness and sales performance, spend, conversions and profit

The corporate team gained:

• Hundreds of hours back

• Cleaner reporting

• Faster optimization cycles

• Less operational drag during peak season

• . . . And, in a change from his usual BFCM schedule, Ryan got to have a relaxing Thanksgiving with friends and family!

Stephanie Hill, Vice President of Marketing at MassageLuXe, sums it up:

“Black Friday and Cyber Monday are normally the most intense weeks of the year for our team. With Flamel.AI, that pressure turned into performance. We generated nearly 4 million measurable outcomes, while maintaining a 5.83% engagement rate across more than 68 million impressions. That kind of efficiency at national scale simply isn’t possible with traditional ad workflows.”

What’s Next for MassageLuXe & Flamel AI?

This performance sets the stage for MassageLuXe to drive business via social ads throughout the year, using Flamel.ai tools. They’ll power ongoing lead generation, membership growth campaigns and multi-channel expansion opportunities, such as: 

• 2025 holiday campaigns

• Mother’s Day promotions

• Grand openings

• Membership drives

• Always-on local promotions

See What Scalable Franchise Advertising Looks Like

If your franchise brand is still:

• Building ads manually

• Struggling with localization

• Fighting franchisee adoption

It’s time for an upgrade! This is what modern, scalable franchise advertising actually looks like.

Demo Flamel AI to see Social Ad Playbooks in action for your multi-location brand.

🚀 Want the full picture on how AI, automation, and local marketing will shape franchise growth next year? 👉 Download the Free 2026 Franchise Marketing Guidebook to explore 10 major trends and insights from 15 franchise leaders.

For decades, new technology followed a familiar pattern: Businesses adopted first. Consumers followed later.

Websites. Email. Mobile apps. And more.

But according to Lynn Blashford, Chief Marketing Officer of White Castle, AI broke that ruleset entirely. She speaks about this at length in Flamel’s 2026 Franchise Marketing Guide Book. In the book, Lynn and 14 other executives in franchising discuss their predictions for the future of business, technology, consumer behaviors and more.

In her 2026 prediction, Lynn points out a historic shift:

“We recognize how consumers are using AI more in their lives. It’s almost the first technology where the consumer has been ahead of the brands and chains.”

Nowadays, a good majority of your customers are already using AI to search, evaluate and decide their purchases . . . even when your brand systems aren’t fully ready for it yet. In fact, 59% are using generative AI tools for some part of their online shopping. That fact alone creates urgency for franchise brands to modernize not just marketing, but operations, data, and customer experience as well.

How Consumers Are Using AI Today

Whether they realize it or not, consumers have been interacting with AI for quite some time. While 2025 has been named the year of AI, its existence in consumer culture has been prominent for a while though:

• Search & Discovery: Asking AI tools what to eat, where to go, what’s open and what’s best nearby
  
  
  

• Shopping Decisions: Comparing prices, products and reviews through AI summaries
  
  
  

• Recommendations: Letting algorithms surface restaurants, gyms and services based on their own personal behaviors
  
  
  

• Decision-Making: Using AI-generated pros/cons, summaries and comparisons
  
  
  

What used to require multiple websites and tabs is now happening in one AI-powered answer. That means your franchise brand is no longer just competing on:

• Website rankings
  
  
  

• Star ratings
  
  
  

• Ad visibility

You’re now competing on whether AI can confidently understand, trust and accurately represent your brand.

Where Do Franchise Brands Fall Behind?

This is where the “catch-up” risk becomes very real. We consistently see franchise systems struggle in four key areas:

1. Local Data Accuracy

If your hours, services, menus, offers or locations aren’t consistent across platforms, AI gets confused. At the end of the day, confused AI simply won’t recommend you.

2. Content Speed

AI thrives on fresh information. Brands that update content quarterly or annually will lose ground to competitors publishing weekly or monthly using AI blogging tools.

3. Personalization at Scale

Customers now expect messaging that feels local, relevant and timely, as opposed to generic corporate copy. If you share content about your local fitness instructor, dog groomers or restaurateurs, you’re much more likely to resonate within your local community. This is because 46% of all Google searches have local intent, and 76% of people who search for a local businesses visit within 24 hours.

4. Disconnected Systems

When ads, social content, blogs, reviews and CRM systems operate in silos, AI can’t build a clear picture of your brand’s data, and therefore, it can’t make educated decisions about how to help you grow.

When these gaps exist, franchises don’t just fall behind digitally. They become invisible in AI-powered discovery.

The Real Risk of Waiting

Nearly a quarter of businesses are not yet using or seriously exploring AI. This choice of waiting to “figure out AI later” comes with serious business consequences:

• ❌ Lost Visibility: If AI can’t confidently recommend your locations, customers never even see you.
  
  
  

• ❌ Lost Trust: Inconsistent or outdated data erodes confidence.
  
  
  

• ❌ Lost Relevance: Brands that feel slow or outdated fade fast.
  
  
  

• ❌ Lost Market Share: While you wait, competitors move in.

This isn’t about replacing humans with machines or gunning for optimization overkill. Rather, brands adopting the best AI solutions in a crowded market recognize that customer behaviors have already changed and their franchise systems must now align with them.

How Can Franchises Catch Up in 2026?

The good news? Playing catch-up simply means that franchises should focus on building their AI systems, rather than buying into hype alone:

✅ Automate the Right Tasks

Let AI handle content generation, social post scheduling and data analysis. Then your employees can focus on marketing strategy and building community.

✅ Build Content Systems (Not One-Off Posts)

Consistent local publishing trains both audiences and AI systems to recognize your relevance.

✅ Modernize Local Workflows

From publishing ads and blogs to managing reviews, franchise teams need to seek tools that streamline their workflows, aggregating their data in one place. Marketing, reputation and customer data must work as one connected ecosystem, not five disconnected tools.

Final Thoughts: Your Catch-Up Era Is Here

Lynn Blashford’s insight captures the moment perfectly: Many consumers adopted AI before brands did. Now, brands must rise to the challenge of meeting people where they are and learning the technical tools they’re using to get there.

That doesn’t spell disaster for franchise systems, but it does spell urgency.

The franchises that win in 2026 will be the ones that:

• Modernize local marketing systems
  
  
  

• Prioritize accurate data
  
  
  

• Publish consistently
  
  
  

• Build trust at the community level

Sound like these are all things on your 2026 roadmap? You can get full guides, customizable worksheets, 10 trend ideas and 15 predictions inside the 2026 Franchise Marketing Guidebook.

👉 Download the Free 2026 Guide Now

Navigating franchise marketing can feel like a constant balancing act of shifting priorities, high expectations and the pressure to drive results across every location. That’s exactly why we brought together Flamel CEO Paul Ehlinger, franchise CMO Alexandra Russo and Another Nine Co-Founder and CEO Ethan Grob to help the marketers of the franchise world step into leadership with confidence.

Below are the biggest takeaways from this lively, practical and very real conversation about what it means to lead marketing inside a growing franchise system.

Think Like a CMO: Build Scaleable Systems

Alex put it best. “Thinking like a CMO is thinking about what we have in place in order to make everybody's job easier.”

It’s not uncommon for marketers to drown in tasks like social posts, events, urgent franchisee questions and last-minute campaigns. But the shift to a CMO mindset comes when you zoom out and ask big-picture questions like:

• Do we have the right tech stack to see what’s working?

• Are we able to track metrics like bookings, conversions and renewals accurately?

• Is our CRM set up correctly . . . or is it duct-taped together?

• Can this process scale when we go from 5 locations to 50?

Ethan echoed this in a way every operator feels deeply saying, “I kind of toggle between both states on a any given day really, so it’s like you kind of have to wrestle between asking ‘is this something I need to just do . . . or is this something that I need to build for scale?’ My default is always to build it for scale.”

Empower Franchisees With Clarity (Because Clear Is Kind)

Empowerment doesn’t come from saying, “You should post more.” It comes from clear guidance by marketing leaders in the forms of:

• Streamlined platform guidance

• Clear templates

• Clear expectations

• Clear ownership of tasks

• Clear deadlines

• Clear feedback (“This was great, so do more of it.”)

Alex reminded us that franchisees aren’t avoiding marketing. Rather, most simply don’t know what to do or how to do it. Systems + support = confidence.

If you want comprehensive guidance on franchise marketing processes and thoughtful insights from franchising leaders, get your copy of our 2026 Franchise Marketing Guide Book.

The First 90 Days: Attract → Convert → Bring Them Back

Alex broke down the “starter CMO roadmap” into three buckets:

1. How do we find new clients?

2. How do we get them to buy?

3. How do we get them to return?

Everything fits into one of those three categories, and this line of thinking turns an overwhelming job into a manageable structure.

For new marketers or leaders suddenly holding the marketing keys, this framework becomes the compass for all decisions. Marketing simply equates to doing the right things at each stage of the customer journey.

Know Your Metrics (But Don’t Drown in Them)

Both Alex and Ethan emphasized focusing on the metrics that truly drive revenue and actually move the business forward. They highlighted several metrics worth paying attention to, while reminding marketers to prioritize the ones that matter most for their specific franchise model:

• Cost per acquisition (CPA)

• Cost to bring a customer back

• Retention and visit frequency

• Understanding true, realistic baselines

• Customer acquisition cost

• Lifetime value (LTV)

• Conversion rates

Use the metrics that align with your brand and business model, because if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it, and you can’t explain its successes and shortcomings to franchisees.

Before You Scale, Get the Boring Stuff Right

This might be the most important lesson in the whole webinar. Both Alex and Ethan stressed that brands often skip the fundamentals, such as:

• Correcting Google Business names

• Ensuring accurate hours

• Updating photos regularly on their profiles

• Having consistent Instagram naming conventions

• Managing Yelp + Apple Maps listings

• Cleaning their marketing & sales data

Boring stuff? It can be.
But is maintaining this information transformational? Absolutely.

Be Findable Where Customers Actually Search, Especially in the AI Era

This topic sparked one of the most exciting conversations of the entire webinar.

More consumers are now searching in:

• ChatGPT

• Claude

• Perplexity

• Google AI Overviews

Of course, this means that fewer are typing traditional Google queries.

Ethan’s team is already optimizing Another Nine’s online presence so these AI search models recognize and recommend the brand.

Alex added that one of the easiest wins right now is treating your Google Business listing like a social feed:

• Post weekly photos

• Keep everything fresh

• Respond to reviews

• Make it easy for AI tools to “trust” you

• Understand that Reddit, social and blog data are now powering LLMs, and said data’s authenticity is key.

AI is changing discovery. The brands who treat every digital touchpoint as a part of their strategy will win the next decade.

Authenticity Beats Perfection, Especially in Social

Alex made a compelling point that people want to see the humans behind a brand.

The next breakout franchise on social?
It’ll be the founder who say, “Come with me to work today as I build this thing from scratch.”

Ethan shared that Another Nine keeps their brand consistent but varies their tone across platforms—snarkier on TikTok, more polished on Facebook, etc.—but everything is anchored in authenticity and consistency. Your personality is an asset. Use it.

Ready to Lead Marketing With Confidence?

Whether you’re a founder, a fractional CMO, a newly promoted marketer or an operator who's been volun-told to “take over the marketing stuff,” this webinar is the roadmap you need.

Watch the full conversation above and remember: You don’t need the CMO title to lead like one. You just need the mindset and discipline to execute.

If you want to kickstart your franchise marketing processes and get thoughtful insights from franchising leaders, get your copy of our 2026 Franchise Marketing Guide Book.