This article is part of a series exploring the Franchise Marketing Insights 2026 research conducted by Franchise Business Review in partnership with Marvia. The series uses the survey data to examine what the findings may mean for franchise marketing teams.
Key takeaway: National and local marketing shouldn’t compete for credit. They do different jobs, so they need goals and metrics that fit those jobs. The survey results show a strong belief that marketing support HQ contributes to franchisee sales performance, but they don’t compare national and local marketing against the same outcomes. That gap is a reason to give local efforts a clearer goal and shared analytics.
Picture a campaign review. HQ is looking at reach, impressions, and participation. But franchisees want to know whether the campaign brought calls, bookings, visits, or sales. If they haven’t agreed on the campaign’s goal and how to measure it, they can both leave the same meeting with different answers about whether the marketing worked.
That’s the tension in the ROI conversation. National campaigns can build awareness across the network. Local campaigns can connect that work to a particular community, event, or offer. Both can support awareness and sales, but they don’t always have the same job or the same useful measure.
The 2026 Franchise Marketing Insights survey data gives us pieces of that puzzle. It captures what franchisors believe, how franchisees rate marketing, and how respondents perceive return. This helps explain why the ROI conversation needs a shared starting point.
Franchisors see a clear link between marketing support and sales. 91% of franchisors agree or strongly agree that the marketing support HQ provides contributes to franchisee sales performance. In response to a separate question, 79% of franchisors believe that locations actively participating in local marketing outperform locations that don't; 44% say the difference is significant.
Franchisees see value in marketing too. 71% of franchisees agree or strongly agree that marketing programs provide a good return on their investment.
But when franchisees rate local marketing against national brand marketing, the scores differ slightly: Franchisees rate the effectiveness of local marketing programs to drive sales performance at FSI 68.6, lower than national brand marketing (FSI 71.5).
That’s not necessarily a contradiction. It’s a sign that “marketing ROI” can mean different things depending on what’s being measured.
A national campaign and a local campaign shouldn’t have to prove their value in the same way. A national campaign might be built to raise awareness across the network. A local promotion might be there to fill seats at an event, generate bookings, or bring customers in for an offer. Before either goes live, HQ and local teams should agree on what it’s meant to do and what would count as a useful result.
That shared goal makes the review more useful. HQ may have reach, engagement, and participation numbers. Local teams may know about calls, visits, bookings, redemptions, and sales. Put the relevant pieces together, rather than asking either side to make the case with only the numbers it can see.
Use consistent campaign names and tracking so everyone can connect the activity to the location, channel, offer, and intended customer action. Impressions matter when awareness is the goal. They can’t answer whether an offer brought in bookings or visits. The measure needs to match the job.
This won’t make every sale easy to attribute to one campaign. It will give HQ and franchisees a clearer basis for deciding what to repeat, adjust, or fund next.
The survey doesn’t settle whether local marketing causes higher sales. It does show why the question keeps coming up: franchisors believe local participation matters, franchisees report value from marketing, and local marketing receives a lower sales-effectiveness rating than national brand marketing.
That’s not a reason to write off local marketing or treat it as a smaller version of a national campaign. It’s a reason to agree on what local activity is meant to accomplish, then look at the analytics together. When both sides use the same goal and can see the relevant numbers, the ROI conversation can move from competing impressions to a better decision about what to do next.
Read the Franchise Marketing Insights 2026 report. For a discussion of the findings and practical next steps, register for the November 10 webinar.