Franchise Your Business
By examining how competitors operate and where they fall short, franchisors can identify untapped opportunities and make more informed decisions about their own growth strategies.
Every franchise brand should know what its competitors are doing. That doesn't mean copying their website, adopting their newest promotion or rebuilding the business every time another concept launches something interesting.
It means understanding the category well enough to know why customers choose one brand over another, what competitors execute particularly well and where everyone else seems to be following the same playbook.
In 2026, that intelligence is easier to gather than ever. Franchisors can study competitor websites, social media, customer reviews, franchise development messaging, FDDs, pricing, promotions, technology, real estate strategies and even the questions consumers are asking online.
The challenge is knowing what to do with what they find.
A useful competitive teardown should ultimately answer three questions: What can we learn from the competitors? What should we avoid? What is everyone else missing?
Competitive research can go wrong when a brand begins with, “They're doing this, so we should too.” The better question is why the competitor made that decision in the first place.
Consider the swim education category. When urSwim founder and CEO Marina Mentzel examined larger brick-and-mortar swim schools, she didn't conclude that her emerging franchise needed to replicate their facilities. Instead, she identified what their model did well and where a fundamentally different approach could reach customers they couldn't.
“The big difference between us and the big-box swim schools is that we're non-brick-and-mortar,” Mentzel said. “That means our franchisees come in at a much lower price point.”
That structural difference allows urSwim to offer lessons at customers' pools and serve communities where operating a traditional swim school may not be financially feasible. “We can target communities that are swim school deserts, where there isn't a swim school within 10, 15 or even 20 miles,” Mentzel said.
The lesson isn't that brick-and-mortar swim schools chose the wrong model. It's that understanding their model helped urSwim clarify its own.
Competitive research is most useful when brands identify why a competitor's strategy works and determine whether that underlying approach makes sense for their own business.
A competitor may have an effective loyalty program. The lesson isn't necessarily to recreate its points structure. It might be that customers in the category respond well to recognition and personalization.
A competing franchise might have a strong development website. Rather than copying its language, another franchisor might recognize that candidates want clearer information about economics, support or scalability.
BooXkeeping took this research-first approach while preparing for a recent brand refresh. Co-founder and CEO Max Emma said the company spent more than a year studying other brands and challenging its own assumptions before deciding what needed to change.
“Research, research, research,” Emma said. “We took our time to see what other brands were doing and answer hundreds of questions, challenging ourselves by asking, ‘What else are we missing?’”
Competitive analysis should expand the questions a brand asks about itself, not provide a template for the answers.
A competitive teardown doesn't always have to end with a strategy for taking market share. Sometimes it reveals potential partners.
Mentzel sees urSwim as adjacent to other businesses serving pool owners rather than automatically treating them as competitors. “We're adjacent to them, not competing with them,” she said. “We're enhancing one of their services.”
The company teaches franchisees to develop relationships with pool service companies, pool construction businesses and property managers that already interact with its target customers.
That mindset broadens the purpose of competitive research. A franchise system can map direct competitors, but it should also understand substitutes and adjacent categories. What else is the customer buying? Who already has the relationship the brand wants? Which companies solve another piece of the same problem?
Sometimes the teardown reveals who to compete against. Sometimes it reveals who to call.
The most dangerous competitive insight may be one that is accurate but irrelevant. A competitor could be generating enormous engagement on TikTok. That doesn't necessarily mean TikTok should become a priority for every brand in the category.
Another franchise might be expanding aggressively through large multi-unit agreements. That doesn't mean the same development structure makes sense for an emerging system.
A restaurant competitor may be succeeding with a much larger menu, aggressive discounting or smaller prototype. Each could be working because of advantages elsewhere in that company's business.
Copying the tactic without understanding the economics underneath it can create the wrong strategy.
The same applies to franchise development. Prospective franchisees are already conducting their own competitive teardowns. Recent 1851 research into the questions buyers ask before inquiring found that candidates consider factors including brand reputation, investment, market opportunity, scalability, franchisor support and differentiation.
Franchisors therefore need to understand competitors well enough to clearly answer a straightforward question from candidates: Why this business instead of another one?
“Different” isn't enough. The answer has to explain why the difference matters.
Competitive analysis shouldn't happen only during a rebrand or when a new competitor enters the market. Categories keep moving. Customer expectations change. Competitors introduce new technology. Emerging brands find cheaper ways to operate. Established brands use their scale to create new advantages. Marketing channels shift, franchise candidates become more sophisticated and ideas that once differentiated a brand eventually become category standards.
Modern franchise systems should have a recurring process for watching those changes while continually asking where opportunities exist to do something competitors aren't doing.
Mentzel's experience with urSwim captures the point. The company doesn't need big-box swim schools to disappear for its model to work. In many cases, the two can serve different customers and different markets.
“We're not just providing swim instruction,” Mentzel said. “We are a franchise and a system. And here's how we're all going to do better together.”
That's ultimately what a competitive teardown should help a modern franchise brand understand. The aim is to understand the market well enough to identify what makes your brand different and where it has room to improve.
Want to learn more about how 1851 helps franchisors grow their franchises with confidence? Visit www.1851growthclub.com and see what we can do for you.
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