I was recently catching up on some light reading at FastCasual.com, a site devoted to insights for innovative restaurants, when I stumbled upon an article that made so much rationale sense in a world that can sometimes be so irrationale.

The article, Moe's invests in local-store marketing strategy, is in reference to Moe's Southwest Grill's recent corporate initiative to increase local marketing efforts by adding a grassroots element to the franchisee's bag of available tools for franchise marketing.

Below are two favorite quotes from the article, and my thoughts on them:

1. "Local-store marketing has always been a part of what we do and we have always provided a kit to our franchise partners, but not many of our franchisees are comfortable leaving their four walls." - Right on! So many franchises want to focus on local advertising and marketing, but neglect to provide quality tools to the franchisees that truly enable them to act as effective local marketers. Ahem. . .better take a peek at Balihoo's Local Marketing Automation solution.

2. "It allows the franchisee. . .to totally control his or her territory, and they're less reliant on corporate staff or the franchisor to do the marketing for them." - FINALLY! While their effort is primarily focused on grassroots marketing, at least they are working to put tools in place so that local marketing isn't something that is only discussed during executive brainstorming sessions, but rather something that is actively done at a local level to drive demand generation.

Kudos to the team at Moe's. Now my recommendation to them: Call us, because we all know that grassroots marketing is just one component of the numerous marketing activities that should take place at the local level. We can help you with the rest!