For prospective franchise business owners and multi-unit operators evaluating brands, the marketing infrastructure is not a side-detail.
A brand’s marketing model is the engine behind lead flow, customer acquisition, and how fast a new location ramps to profitability. A brand that consolidates budget for scale, reacts to demand in days instead of quarters, and connects departments around one customer experience is solving problems most franchise systems still treat as unavoidable overhead.
How Our Team Prioritizes Franchisees
Across the retail franchise industry, local marketing spend is often the weakest link. According to BizIQ, local SEO in 2026 accounts for the largest share of franchise marketing spend industry-wide. In our system, we took a different route. We consolidated spend at the network level and unlocked 40% more impressions without adding a dollar to the total budget.
Chris McGee, VP of Growth Marketing at Batteries Plus, describes the brand’s approach as an investment portfolio rather than a single bet. Brand-building and short-term demand campaigns are two asset classes that we compound together, ensuring cohesion across the board.
Our philosophy gets tested every time the temperature swings. When a heat wave or cold front hits, demand for batteries spikes quickly, and the marketing team has to move just as fast. McGee says her team is a “pirate ship, built to turn faster than the slower-moving brands still waiting on quarterly planning cycles.”
When we noticed shoppers weren’t understanding what our battery franchises actually sell, that insight reshaped an entire national campaign around real stores and associates instead of generic product messaging.
Can We Break Silos That Slow Most Franchise Brands Down?
Speed only works if all departments are working together. Sara Whiteleather, Senior Director of Marketing at Batteries Plus, pointed out a problem she saw that was common across the franchise industry, “Every department can hit its own numbers while the customer still has a broken experience.”
Her fix was to focus on a shared North Star, a goal that connects marketing, ecommerce, merchandising, and store operations, instead of five separate scorecards.
Her clearest proof point is the brand’s “Fit Finder” tool, built after customer service and social listening flagged shoppers struggling to pick the right car battery, then refined with Google and AI once the data confirmed where people were dropping off.
“Poor collaboration just creates rework, misalignment, and delays,” Whiteleather says. It’s a reality that could describe most franchise organizations, and a problem Batteries Plus built systems specifically to avoid.
How We Outpace Industry Standard
Most franchise systems run marketing on a calendar. Batteries Plus runs it on a forecast.
The typical franchise brand plans campaigns around a holiday season, locks in creative months ahead, and hopes demand shows up on schedule. Batteries Plus has multiple revenue streams that work on different demand schedules. So our marketing team re-evaluated and turned that constraint into an advantage.
In 2026, we made our first full-year commitment to always-on cable TV, a channel most franchise brands still treat as a seasonal burst instead of a constant presence. That shift is projected to boost reach by 25%, helping us stay visible year-round instead of fitting campaigns around a handful of key dates.
That’s the throughline across every part of our model: we don’t wait for the calendar to tell us when to show up.
The Result: A Growth Engine Built to Compound
None of these initiatives work in isolation. Consolidated budgets, weather-reactive campaigns, always-on TV, and pre-opening commercial pipelines are only as strong as the systems connecting them.
That’s the same principle behind our shared North Star goal internally, and it’s why the marketing engine keeps translating into real growth. In the first half of 2026 alone, we signed 15 franchise agreements representing 30 new units, and opened 12 new stores, numbers that reflect a system built to support franchisees first.
These initiatives are also the result of having the right people in place. Our marketing team is truly one of the best in the industry. We are so proud that both Chris McGee and Sara Whiteleather have been awarded for their hard work by Franchise Assembly. Chris was named a 2026 Franchise Marketing Trailblazer, and Sara was named to their 2026 Franchise Marketers as “Ones to Watch.”
Become a franchise owner with Batteries Plus today!
FAQ
Q: How is Batteries Plus’s marketing model different from other franchise brands? A: Batteries Plus treats brand building and demand generation as connected investments rather than competing budgets, and reacts to weather-driven demand within days instead of planning around a seasonal calendar.
Q: Does Batteries Plus support franchisees before their store opens?
A: Yes. Through its Commercial First program, new franchise owners can begin building commercial relationships with hospitals, schools, municipalities, and local businesses before their retail location officially opens.
Q: What is the “Fit Finder” tool at Batteries Plus?
A: It’s a customer-facing tool that matches shoppers with the correct car battery. It was built from customer service and social feedback, then refined with Google and AI once data showed customers abandoning the process mid-search.