Brands Winning at Franchise Marketing: Kix Mobile

The youngest franchise brand in 1851’s roundup, Kix Mobile, began franchising just over a year ago. But the emerging franchise was built to grow quickly, offering multi-unit development packages and growth incentives, including an area-representative plan that offers investors the rights to a territory that can support 20 or more locations.

That growth model has allowed Kix Mobile to expand rapidly in its short time as a franchise, establishing new stores and development contracts in Illinois, North Dakota, Florida and Canada in under a year.

We spoke with Lonnie Helgerson, Chairman of the Board at Kix Mobile and best-selling author of Five Pennies: Ten Rules to Successfully Build a Franchise Mega-Brand and Maximize System Profits, a guide to building and growing franchise brands. Helgerson said Kix Mobile has not only been built to attract multi-unit franchisees, it was also designed to complement the existing portfolios of sophisticated multi-brand franchisees. We asked Helgerson how the young brand has already started to catch those big fish.

1851: What are some of the ways Kix Mobile markets to prospective franchisees?

Helgerson: Much like other brands, we use a variety of techniques, including Adwords, social media, franchise brokers and a number of other tools.

1851: What are Kix Mobile’s key points of differentiation from other cell phone repair and sales concepts, and how are those points communicated through marketing?

Helgerson: We have two key differentiators in the marketplace. First, we offer Xchange-Repair, which is a new and innovative approach to phone repair that provides fast and easy device and data exchange for one low price.

Typically, Xchange-Repair pricing is comparable to a standard repair shop fee. You hand a Kix team member your iPhone or Samsung device with a broken camera, and they hand you back a high-quality, certified pre-owned device with your data restored for a flat fee. The process takes minutes, where other shops can take hours.

Second, we specialize in buying, selling and trading used phones. Much like GameStop has done in their sector, Kix Mobile is bringing a hyper-local, quality solution with a standardized pricing model for certified pre-owned phones to customers.

To convey those points to prospective franchisees, we use infographics and are developing explainer videos for social media.

1851: How has franchise marketing changed in the past five years?

Helgerson: Since Kix Mobile is relatively new, we’ve been able to use the most modern tactics to attract franchisee candidates. However, as seasoned executives in franchising, we can say everything has changed in the last five years concerning franchise marketing. Today, candidates want to do as much self-discovery as possible. So providing them with content and market presence is paramount. For a new brand such as Kix Mobile, market presence can be difficult. However, you need to push for brand awareness in as many venues as possible, including social media, industry trade shows, supplier stakeholders, press, websites and email among other channels.

1851: How does Kix Mobile tailor its marketing to attract qualified franchise investors?

Helgerson: From day one, we built Kix Mobile to attract multi-unit owners. In our sector, which is wireless, the vast majority of store owners are multi-unit and can own hundreds of locations across different brands. For that type of franchisee, we need to focus on providing tools of scale and making sure we have an open and streamlined communication channel with their development and management teams. We have spent a considerable amount of time and resources partnering with the right supplier stakeholders to provide the tools, training, support and logistics for high-growth franchise owners.

1851: Does Kix Mobile market to existing franchisees to promote expansion?

Helgerson: Absolutely. Again, the wireless industry provides a lot of room for multi-unit growth across brands, so we promote expansion to franchisees in other brands as well as our own.