Brand Building Report

Jun 9, 2026 | Blogs

In an increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace, brand building has never been more important. While technology, buyer behaviour, and marketing channels continue to evolve at pace, one thing remains constant: people choose brands they know, trust, and connect with.

This report explores why brand building is more relevant than ever in 2026, examining its role in influencing decision-making, creating competitive advantage and driving sustainable growth.

Brand Building Report
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The value of your operations manual

Mar 10, 2026 | Blogs

When was the last time you reviewed your Franchise Operations Manual. With advice from Louise Harris, The Ops Portal, we look at the key of this crucial piece of collateral?

When you set up a franchise, one of your most crucial documents, alongside the franchise agreement (the parameters of the franchisee business relationship written in formal, legal, English), is your operations manual. This document is the guidebook for how franchisees can run a business under your brand. As Louise Harris, from the Ops Portal, explains, “Your Operations Manual has two parts: The first read shows how a franchisee can successfully operate in your industry and run the business. The second is much more detailed, giving ‘how-to’ descriptions for the actual elements of your brand; it’s more technical.”

We’re willing to bet that if you’ve been in franchising for any length of time, it may be a while since you refreshed your Operations Manual. Though, whenever you make changes and innovations to your business or structure, one of the first things you should be doing, is incorporating them into your manual, to enable franchisees to follow your guidebook to success.

For Louise, the real crux of this is around how the Operations Manual is presented. “Many people can be turned off by the thought of reading big, thick, Manuals. One of the ways to overcome this is by incorporating video elements to your manual, showing rather than telling, how to do something. It can be as easy as taking a handheld video of a franchisee performing specific roles in their business, for example. Although you can’t do away with writing altogether, it’s worth thinking about how to present it: from using as few words as possible, to using bullet points, or colour so the document is more engaging and accessible for people. This is important when you have franchisees with dyslexia or where English isn’t their first language.”

Whilst it is an important document, not only does your Manual need to be up-to-date, but it needs to be legally unique to you and your brand. Because of the Copyright laws franchise brands are entitled to have, it’s not about looking at what another franchise has done, and replicating it for your Manual, no matter how amazing you think it is. This is where drawing on the skills of someone who enjoys creating Operations Manuals (like Louise!) is beneficial, especially when you don’t.

Over the years, industries and technologies change; such as a new legal requirement for your industry, better systems and processes, or a franchisee has discovered a better way to operate. This means you need to regularly make updates to your manual. As Louise says, “Your Manual is a living breathing document! If you want to maintain credibility with your franchisees, and not lose money in your business, keeping your document updated is incredibly valuable, especially when you make regular updates and changes to your business. And that your franchisees know whenever you make a change to it! You need an efficient feedback loop to let franchisees know there’s a change, and how to implement your changes into their business.”

There’s a moral, ethical, and legal responsibility when it comes to the Operations Manual and so supporting your franchisees to not just be aware of changes and updates you’re making, but to incorporate them too. Some franchisors feel intimidated at the thought of reviewing their Manual, worrying they don’t have time, so they put it off and put it off. But there are tools and resources to help, such as offering a reminder to franchisees to check and review their Manual whenever you make a change. “In reality,” Louise explains, “your Manual is a great tool, but only if it’s relevant. And then throw in the ‘people problem’ where franchisees can be slow on the uptake, and your change becomes challenging. Established businesses, who regularly update their manuals, will work with their Franchisee Advisory Committee, talk through the strategic process for the future of the brand with the franchisees. They’re then in a position to help and guide the rest of the network on behalf of the franchisor.”

So, when it comes to the value of your Operations Manual, hopefully you can see that it’s something which can strengthen your business and not updating it can add risk to your franchise operations. We would recommend listening to more of what Louise discusses, as she talks through her franchising experiences and why, as a franchisee, she faced challenges herself around an outdated Operations Manual!

Find out more about Louise and The Ops Portal 

 

Watch Louise on The Franchise Marketing Show

Coconut planting trees for Christmas… and beyond

Dec 25, 2022 | Blogs, Coconut News

At Coconut, we’ve been thinking differently this year. As well as focusing on the wellbeing of our team, we’re focused on the wellbeing of the Planet!

They’re a conscientious bunch, over at Coconut! Which is why, rather than contributing to the world’s emissions, they’re doing what they can to offset the carbon footprint of the team – and of their clients!

Every year, thousands of cards with pretty sparkles and cutesy designs, are sent across the UK. However, the University of Exeter discovered, in 2021, how sending just one card, produces about 140 grams of carbon dioxide. This is addition to those designs which are not combustible, or can’t be recycled. And these are just the cards. Add to this the impact of sending gifts, too!

So, in a bid to be different, and positively impact the world, Coconut Marketing have planted 2,000 trees on behalf of their clients for Christmas, at projects in Kenya and Mozambique, through Ecologi. Although neither country need Coconut trees, by helping with the reforestation programme of Eden Reforestation Projects, they’re making a difference on your behalf.

This is in addition to the individual tree planting activities some of the Coconut team have supported this year, through TreeApp. Planting, another 250 trees around the world.

The impact of this mindful gift means the Coconuts have saved 2.63 tonnes of CO2e or 8m2 of sea ice. The equivalent of two long haul flights, or 6,525 miles in the car! Happy Christmas!

Coconut has also supported two ecosystem projects on behalf of staff, something the whole team is supportive of:

  • Peatland restoration and conservation in Indonesia
  • This will help to protect habitat thought to be home to up to 10% of the world’s remaining Bornean orangutan population, so future generations can enjoy their antics.
  • Generating electricity from landfill gas in Brazil

The objective of this project is to collect the landfill gas produced in the Uberlândia landfills and use it to generate electricity, preventing environmentally damaging methane from being released into the atmosphere. The project expects to produce 354,968 MWh of energy during its lifetime.

Adam Lovelock, one of Coconut’s Directors says, “At Coconut Marketing, we’re committed to being environmentally responsible and supporting sustainable practices. Which is why we decided to donate to Ecologi, and support regeneration projects around the world, rather than sending traditional Christmas presents to our clients. We hope our contribution will have a positive impact on combating climate change, and encourage others to join us in supporting this important cause.”

What a lovely bunch, the Coconuts are!

To see and/or track any of the projects Coconut are supporting, visit: ecologi.com/coconutmarketing
Or, to start your own low carbon business forest, visit: ecologi.com/coconutmarketing?r=6390aa29224db807b7d14e56

FranTech designed with franchising in mind

Aug 16, 2022 | Blogs

When it comes to franchise technology, very few systems are geared for our industry, or the unique franchisor/franchisee relationship. Adam Knight thinks franchisors – you – deserve better 

During our many (many) years of working with franchisors from every possible industry, the team here at Coconut has gained quite a unique viewpoint. Based on our knowledge, areas of expertise and useful insight, we’ve become a port of call for Franchisors, with all manner of technology issues, as well as being trusted partners for marketing.

Although our primary focus has always been marketing related, particularly with our Franchise Recruitment work and, in recent years, Digital Advertising on behalf of whole networks, we’ve developed a deep understanding of how the entire franchise network operates. Obviously the mechanics of marketing have become more technical over time, and strategies have come to rely on a considerable amount of technology, in recent years.

Almost every time we’d worked with someone on these types of projects, the solution seemed to feel as though we were just trying to find an answer with the smallest amount of compromises. Other times, we would have to rig multiple different systems together. Although this solved the problem, it required a substantial amount of maintenance and management, to keep everything running smoothly. Quite time consuming, and frustrating at times for our clients.

What is FranTech?

An excellent question! Since we started helping franchisors, we’ve seen every piece of technology innovated and implemented across a number of functionality-use cases, from CRM, class bookings, secure messaging, and social media management. All provide good solutions for business, but as soon as you add in the franchisor/franchisee relationship to the mix, they start to fall apart or require considerable of customisation. This invariably can end up being extremely costly. Sometimes this is in the literal cost, other times in the scope of what was actually required from the solution.

At one point, a franchisor told us they were so embarrassed by the franchise management solution they ‘d signed up to, and how it looked because they were asking me to design a user interface to sit over the top, and make it look and feel more professional.

So, from our point of view, FranTech is modern and flexible software built specifically with franchising in mind.

There are a number of tools being sold as ‘for franchising’. However, these are blatant repackaging of software made for other use cases, and shoe-horned into franchise networks with some inelegant and glaring issues. Big software companies don’t see franchising as worth the huge investment it would take to build modern and flexible solutions, because of its relative size compared to the global industry based markets. Despite the fact the UK franchise industry has a net worth of £17 billion!

So, franchisors are left with these poor (and often expensive) solutions, and put up with them, because there doesn’t seem to be an alternative.

We think Franchisors deserve better!

Which is why we redesigned the future

In 2018, Coconut began running Google Ads for a large network of franchisees. We’d been running ads for networks before, but not at this scale. We needed a system to administer this activity. Smoothly and easily. It would need to be able to take payments, provide invoices, deliver monthly updates, and report on the actual performance of the Google Ads activity. As you can imagine, doing this manually would have been a huge amount of work. So, we systemised, centralised and organised and as soon as we were done, it instantly became obvious we had the skeleton of a system which could solve a large amount of our clients’ problems.

We started talking to our clients, asking them what problems they had with running their networks, and made a list of everything we could solve through our system. Almost every issue our clients spoke to us about, revolved around administration, centralisation, access control, content management, knowledge management, and internal communication. This formed the basis of Franchise Cloud and our Franchise Relationship Management platform. So that is the history of how Coconut created Franchise Cloud. The thing we are really interested to talk about is the future.

Can Franchise Cloud really help?

The way we’ve approached this is quite unique. We have built solutions to all of the issues we have seen over the last 20 years in franchising. But, wherever a decision needed to be made about how a certain function would need to work for a particular customer, in their real world usage, rather than hard-coding our assumption of how we think it needs to work, we’ve left it open and customisable.

For example, three different franchise businesses working in children’s activities, share the same organisational structure but work in hugely different ways.

The way marketing is handled across different networks is also radically different. Where one may handle everything at HQ, another expects franchisees to handle their own marketing entirely. This is why we believe it’s important for your management software to not only understand these fundamental differences, but be able to handle them without skipping a beat.

Through Franchise Cloud, we believe we have achieved this. However, the only way for you to really know whether it can work for your brand and network, is to talk me through how you are currently working, and what you need/want. I can then demonstrate how Franchise Cloud can meet your requirements.