Last week I was invited in to speak with a large pizza chain. I was to meet with the VP of Marketing and the VP of Operations. While waiting in a conference room a man entered and introduced himself as the CFO of the organization.

He heard I was coming and said he just wanted to say hello. But he really wanted to ask me a question about marketing. After the introduction he asked, “I always have a difficult time spending money with advertising agencies. We have a track record of paying large retainers up front, receiving a lot of talk and gibberish and then having nothing left to show for it. What makes your agency different?”

My answer to that question made him reach his hand out to shake mine and win his vote of confidence.

Here was my answer to a very good question- “Spending money with advertising agencies can often be equated to spending money on your favorite charity. The reason that you write the check in both cases is to make yourself feel better and to gain a feeling of accomplishment. The difference is that you understand there will be no financial return from the charity. However, investing in our Local Store Marketing program offers you these quantifiable, tangible returns:

  • Increase Same Store Sales as a result of LSM
  • A system of tracking LSM activity
  • Educating and empowering your franchisees to go out and get business
  • Creating a partnership between our company and yours to get results
  • We help to decrease the amount of store failures in your system
  • You will have a virtual LSM division of your organization-planning, creating, updating, implementing and tracking Local Store Marketing activity

Local Store Marketing offers everything that traditional advertising and marketing cannot.