I have listened to the music of Rage Against the Machine for many years and have even learned how to play a couple of their songs on guitar, which has given me a huge amount of respect for Tom Morello.
One of the things I think my generation will remember them for most clearly, however, was their rise to number one in the UK music charts back in 2009, when Killing in the Name beat the X Factor single, Joe McElderry’s The Climb, to the top spot, selling more than 500,000 digital copies in the Christmas chart week. It was a rare moment of public rebellion against perfectly polished pop and brought an end to Simon Cowell’s run of four consecutive years of X Factor winners topping the charts.
If we look more deeply at why that happened, it reveals something important about human nature. As a whole, we do not actually love perfection, even if we are reluctant to admit it openly. We would never shout that from the rooftops, but deep down we are far more drawn to imperfection.
Maybe watching The Matrix far too many times has influenced that way of thinking for me, but it does raise an interesting question. When a company has a filming day, which videos do you really enjoy watching the most? I saw the answer first-hand at the excellent Annual BFA Conference last November. It was the bloopers reel, people making mistakes, dropping their guard and sharing genuine reactions. As human beings, with all our own flaws and quirks, we absolutely love seeing others reveal theirs.
So what does this have to do with franchising? Most of us working in the UK franchising industry know there is a distinct lack of trust among those outside it. Some of that mistrust is learned behaviour, while some of it comes from franchising being lazily bundled together with other “opportunity” models that just happen to share a name with some very famous ancient Egyptian structures in Giza. Either way, the result is the same, potential franchisees often start from a position of caution.
That is why we need to find better ways to build emotional connections earlier in the recruitment process, and why video has a much bigger role to play than many people currently realise. This is not about slick, overproduced videos telling prospects how perfect everything is. What is needed instead is honest content that shows what it is really like to be part of a franchise brand.
Videos with a genuine tone, featuring people who truly believe in what they are saying. They do not need to be perfect, they do not need to be scripted, and they should not sound as though head office has forced someone in front of a camera to recite the company line. Or, to bring it back to why I have shoehorned Rage Against the Machine into a franchising article, this is about raging against the perfect.
We are entering a world where AI is pushing us ever closer to lazy perfection, where we all risk sounding the same unless we make a deliberate effort to focus on what makes us different. There is no need to smash up guitars or shout in people’s faces, just a conscious decision to show people what franchising is actually all about.
The people.
