SPECIAL ISSUE of the Journal of Marketing Channels
Franchising Trends and Challenges in the Digital Age: Local, National, and International Perspectives
Deadline for manuscript submission is December 31, 2018
Guest Editors
Hyo Jin (Jean) Jeon, University of Nevada – Reno
Nada Mumdziev, Webster Vienna Private University
SPECIAL ISSUE BACKGROUND INFORMATION
This Special Issue of the Journal of Marketing Channels is dedicated to marketing channels research in franchising. Franchising is one of the most popular methods for the distribution of goods and services. Many firms have grown rapidly by penetrating their brands through these forms of licensing relationships. Over the past several decades franchise research has examined different facets of franchising such as contractual design, organizational governance structure and ownership patterns, channel relationship management, and foreign market entry strategies. However, investigations into fundamental issues regarding franchising often have been limited to the discussion of the trends and challenges in current franchising topics that can be beneficial to practitioners.
This Special Issue is designed to specially address franchising in the digital age. The traditional business model of franchising, successful for over half a century, now faces various challenges with the rise of e-commerce, digital marketing channels, cutting edge technology, and tech-savvy customers. This forces both franchisees and franchisors to find ways of implementing omnichannel strategies that combine all of their established sales channels in a seamless manner.
However, e-commerce and omnichanneling brings with it a number of issues in franchise relationships such as technological investments, channel conflict, delivery and returns management, and consistency. Franchising, as a business model, could have significant influences on the omnichannel challenges. Overall, there is a lack of empirical research on how e-commerce, multichannel and omnichannel strategies, online marketing, and the social media outreach of franchisors and their franchisees will influence franchise systems.
We strongly believe that the field of franchising could largely benefit from new theoretical frameworks that can explain current franchising issues in the digital age. We therefore invite researchers from various disciplines to submit empirical and conceptual studies focused on investigating the described challenges in the context of franchise systems from local, national, and international perspectives. Examples of research that would be welcomed include:
- The rise of digital channels and omnichannel strategies in international retail and
service franchising.
- The effects of e-commerce and omnichanneling on traditional or product distribution
franchising.
- The influence of social media on the brand equity of business format franchising.
- The role of digital channels and their impact on standardization versus adaptation
decisions in international franchising.
- The influence of the Internet and price transparency of franchise business transactions
on the roles of franchise brokers, sales representatives, and other channel partners.
- The managerial challenges of using an omnichannel strategy for various aspects of
franchising including uniformity and consistency throughout a franchise system.
- Channel conflicts within franchise systems that implement an omnichannel strategy.
- The influence of technology development on the growth of multiunit franchising.
- These examples are not intended to stifle the creativity of potential authors as papers concerning most issues related to franchising in the digital age are welcome. If in doubt about the suitability of a paper’s theme for this Special Issue, please contact either of the guest editors.
SUBMISSION INFORMATION
- Submitted manuscripts should not have been previously published or be currently
under consideration for publication elsewhere.
- All manuscripts will be double-blind refereed. Manuscripts must be submitted
electronically in Word format and must be consistent with the author submission guidelines of the Journal of Marketing Channels that can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/WJMC. Click on the “Instructions for authors” tab. A complete Style Guide for Manuscript Submissions to the Journal of Marketing Channels can be downloaded at http://bit.ly/wjmc_styleguide
- Manuscripts should be received no later than December 31, 2018, with accepted
papers published in late 2019 or early 2020. Please submit directly to either of the guest editors, preferably through e-mail as a Microsoft Word attached document.
Hyo Jin (Jean) Jeon
Assistant Professor of Marketing
Department of Marketing
College of Business
University of Nevada – Reno / MS0028
Reno, Nevada 89557-0206 USA
E-mail: hjeon@unr.edu
Nada Mumdziev
Assistant Professor, Entrepreneurship & Strategy
Department of Business and Management
Webster Vienna Private University
Palais Wenkheim, Praterstrasse 23
1020 Vienna, Austria
E-mail: nada.mumdziev@webster.ac.at
