WSJ:
All politics, it’s said, are local. The same often holds true for franchising, despite its reputation as a cookie-cutter, by-the-book way of doing business.
Being able to adapt to local customs, laws and tastes is particularly crucial when a franchise goes abroad.
Take Domino’s Pizza Inc., presumably about as standardized an operation as there is. Put a fresh-tossed pie in an oven, bake for 5½ minutes, box and deliver. But when the Ann Arbor, Mich., company took that concept abroad, it experienced an array of situations that ran counter to its operations manual.
In Japan, Domino’s had to modify its delivery procedures because addresses there often aren’t sequential but instead are determined by a building’s age. On Aruba, it soon found that using motorcycles to deliver pizzas was too dangerous because of the island’s strong winds. (Small trucks solved the problem.) In the Philippines, locations of stores at times were chosen using feng shui, a Chinese art that positions buildings according to spiritual flows. And because many Icelanders stay up all hours, Domino’s stores there must be open much longer than elsewhere.
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