Small Business Stories -Hot Dish Advertising

Alex Fees: I’m Alex Fees on SBTV.com joining you from the IFA conference in Orlando, Florida, that’s the International Franchise Association and Jenn Onnen is with me here. Now Jenn, good to meet you. Jenn Onnen: Good to meet you. Alex Fees: I appreciate you being here. Jenn is the Vice President of Hot Dish Advertising in Minneapolis. Jenn Onnen: Right. Alex Fees: What that does mean Jenn? What is Hot Dish Advertising? Jenn Onnen: Hot Dish is, well there are a lot of different ideas about what Hot Dish is but in Minnesota, it’s a casserole. Alex Fees: Oh really? Jenn Onnen: And so we built our brand around the idea that we have hot fresh ideas and that we dish with our consumers. Alex Fees: Yeah. Jenn Onnen: And our client consumers and we create a diet desirable end result. Alex Fees: So Jenn, you’re targeting franchising as far as marketing and advertising purposes are concern, why? Jenn Onnen: That is correct. Well we’ve fallen to franchising about 8 years ago because we picked up a couple of retail based clients that just happen to be franchisors and so through going to their conventions, we met other suppliers in the franchise industry and we discovered the IFA and the rest was history. We found this and love this as our niche. Alex Fees: Are their special needs in franchising when it comes to advertising? Jenn Onnen: Yes. Marketing and franchising is much different than marketing in a corporation where you don’t have franchisees that actually have to execute your brand so it’s a lot in franchising, it’s a lot trickier than try to keep consistency. Alex Fees: Oh yeah. Jenn Onnen: And get the franchisees to buy into the brand position that you have and then actually talk about and market the brand in the same way form market to market. Alex Fees: Are you targeting the franchise or the franchisee as far as advertising concerns. Jenn Onnen: Mostly the franchisor, we prefer to work with the franchisor and really build the brand position and the marketing strategy and then we’ll help them sell it into the franchisees and in some cases, the systems that we work with are big enough that will work with groups of franchisees to help them on a local market level but for the majority of the work we do is that the franchise are directly. Alex Fees: Okay, tell me about your involvement, your hot dishes involvement with IFA. Jenn Onnen: We’re very involved with the IFA. I would say, well, three of my partners and I are both on committees. We speak at a lot of different events, talking about franchise regeneration and consumer marketing and advertising. Our president sits on the executive committee for the board of the IFA so we’re just really involve and I think that that’s been crucial to our growth in this industry. Alex Fees: So Jenn, if somebody is considering getting into franchising, can you give me kind of a thumbnail sketch for what they did to know about marketing and advertising? Jenn Onnen: Well, a lot of franchisees, they are coming from all different areas of the world and all different levels of expertise and so they don’t need to know a ton about marketing. What they need to do is, they need to be able to follow a franchised system. So most of our clients have a marketing strategy in place and they need to, when they buy in to the brand, they need to also buy into that strategy and then of course, customize it until we get on a local level but most of these franchisees; you don’t need a lot of expertise in the field that you’re going into. Alex Fees: Okay. All right. Again, she is Jenn Onnen. Jenn is the Vice President of Hot Dish Advertising in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Jenn Onnen: Yeah, thank you. Alex Fees: Good to meet you. I appreciate you being here. I neglected to ask you, what if people want more information about Hot Dish? Jenn Onnen: You can go to hotdishad.com, h, o, t, d, I, s, h, a, d.com. Alex Fees: Hot dish ad. Jenn Onnen: Yap Alex Fees: .com. All right Jenn, thank you. Jenn Onnen: Thank you.