The Future of Innovation in Franchising
Opportunity India Desk
Jul 23, 2020 -
7 min read
Innovation is essential for business growth, and being innovative must be a shared responsibility across the organization. The leading franchises of the world were built on innovative business models and have had to constantly adapt to stay at the top of their game.
Here we present some diverse opportunities with all of them being strategically fit in the environment we are in today.
The consumer behaviour for a laundry-led brand like UClean has changed quite significantly in the last four months. It has directly reflected on the consumer profile that has been visiting the stores pre-COVID vs post-COVID. But what the brand has seen very consistently, across the board, across all the 55 cities that we are operational in presently and also international territories like Kathmandu, is that the importance of cleaning has changed dramatically.
So, about 4-5 months back, cleaning was a very unglamorous industry, hence from a franchising perspective also, it took the brand a lot of hard work to convince someone to invest in the cleaning franchise brand. But this has changed now. UClean is getting a lot of organic leads; the number of franchise enquiries that it is getting on its website today as compared to 4-5 months back has increased by almost 50%.
One very interesting trend that UClean has observed is that there are a lot of new customers that are getting added to the UClean stores. These new customers pre-COVID were affiliated to Dhobis, but with the fear of less transparency with Dhobis, they have now approached UClean.
Almost 95% of our business is pick-up and drop services. But with COVID, UClean has seen an increased demand for contactless pick-up and drop. The customers don’t want to interact with the delivery boy; they would leave their clothes outside their home for the delivery boy to come and pick them up and deliver it back at the doorstep itself.
upGrad or any of the new generation edtech companies have unfortunately stayed away from franchising for quite some time. But, upGrad has tried to change it. Last financial year, the company has started franchising; it has tied up with few franchisees and started this whole experimentation of starting a retail store and see how it works.
After the pandemic started, upGrad has truly become an online company in every sense, from a product which was online to becoming an organisation which was online. The company is doing sales from home, marketing campaigns are set from home, products shoots happen at home, and product creations happen at home. This made it think that why it is asking its franchises to have a retail outlet as they can also work from home. Hence, upGrad is working on the franchise model called the channel partner model, wherein franchisees are also remotely working on getting admission to more and more courses.
The channel partner model is a truly online model, where upGrad has deployed CRM systems using which leads can be shred to our franchisees remotely. Franchisees can do telecalling or face-to-face video call and convince the lead on the digital space itself. With this, in 30 days, upGrad has on-boarded and started working with 100 channel partners.
Earlier mobility was a luxury but now it became a necessity. There has been a massive shift in consumer behaviour during the COVID situation due to two main reasons, including a huge spike in the prices of the two-wheeler and huge trust deficit in public transport. This has brought a new set of customers to the second-hand bike segment.
CredR pre-dominantly operates only through the franchise model. CredR plays a small role in the aspiration of a lot of Indians who can’t afford to buy a brand new bike. CredR is a value-driven consumer brand which requires the massive support of onboard franchisees to help our business grow faster.
This is the segment which will make a huge impact in the days to come as this is as much relevant to the tier-1 cities and as much to tier-2 & 3 cities. People are searching online and discovering us and try to see if we can deliver the vehicle at their doorstep. This is the only business segment wherein its franchises are happily selling goods to the consumers by even keeping the shutters down. In cities like Delhi and Bangalore, CredR has seen up to 30-40% jump in customers ordering the bike online and getting delivered to their homes; these bikes are predominantly coming from the franchise showroom.
Post-COVID, many restaurants will no longer be in working condition due to high rents and many more things. Going forward, consumers will also prefer to sit at home despite going out to have their meal as safety will be there number one priority. Therefore, cloud kitchen will play a huge part in the foodservice industry.
Chhapppan Bhog operates on a cloud kitchen model, providing high safety standards. The brands prepared food in the central kitchen, and then it is retort and packed. This packed food gets shipped to all the kitchens, where they can just heat the food, garnish it and it will be ready to go. Therefore, it will be a chef less kitchen and flameless kitchen with zero percentage wastage of food.
Chhapppan Bhog is an asset-light model with no specific location needed.
Healthcare was never a luxury but always a necessity of people. Generic Aadhaar has already disrupted the pharma industry. The brand is uplifting local singe retail outlets who are facing a huge business competition in today’s local market from big medical malls and online pharmacies. It is taking the local singe retail outlets under the brand Generic Aadhaar and giving re-life to empower at the local level.
A single medical store owner who wishes to set up a new franchisee of Generic Aadhaar, they can’t have the entire infrastructure to keep all the necessary medicines to give to end-consumers. Therefore, Generic Aadhaar is taking all the products directly from the WHO GMP facilities and it is giving to the end-consumers by its franchise outlets. Generic Aadhaar has created an ecosystem wherein it’s a B2B2C venture.
According to reports, 60% of Indian people are not getting medicines which are necessary. Generic Aadhaar’s main mission is to reach that 60% population and make medicines available to them.
Oxygarden forest is India’s first air sanitizer. It has 50 plants in it and a 75-litre water tank. With these features, it becomes a combo of self-sustainability. The brand is able to cater to a space of 800 sq ft with each unit producing 700 litres of oxygen. The reasons brand opted for franchising include it needs a high-end experienced store, need an efficient and personalized installation to keep connected, and rapid geographical expansion.
The first innovation that Oxygarden brought is the green self-sustainable studio; each Oxygarden store will have more than 500 plants that are all self-sustainable and no human-touch will be required. Another innovation was needed in the supply chain where we have implemented a unique distribution channel where it has reduced the cost of transportation by 66% and the chance of damaging the plants are reduced by 99%.
