03. What Local Actually Means

As a franchisor, Dianne Davis talked about local marketing constantly — support your franchisees locally, give them tools to reach their community, help them build trust in their market — and then handed them a national brand kit and said “good luck, go get them.” But local marketing without content is just noise. What actually moves the needle, she argues, is real and specific: customer testimonials filmed in the franchisee's own neighborhood, an owner story that names the city out loud, a location tour of the actual space the community will walk into. Not a national campaign sliced down to a zip code — content built from the ground up for that one location. She spent 24 years trying to give franchisees the local support they needed; this, she says, is what it finally looks like in practice — everything she wished she could have handed back to them.