PR, Email, and Social: What Franchise Marketers Are Actually Doing With Owned and Earned Media Going Into 2027
Here's a tension I've been sitting with: we keep telling franchise marketers to invest in their owned channels — social, email, their websites — and yet the honest conversation in the room is that social is becoming a content graveyard for brand feeds, email might have an expiration date, and PR just went through an identity crisis before suddenly becoming the most measurable thing in the room.
I had that honest conversation recently on Franchise Marketing Spotlight with two people who live in this space daily.
Ashley Mitchell leads marketing for East Coast Wings and Grill and has spent her career navigating the full franchise marketing lifecycle, from unit-level consumer marketing to M&A to fractional leadership. Zack Fishman is a partner at Fishman PR, the largest franchise-specific PR firm in the industry, and co-founder of Franchise Supplier Network, where he focuses almost exclusively on owned media: texting, organic social, and review management.
Here's what actually came out of that conversation.
Social is entertainment now. That changes the ROI math.
Ashley was direct about what performs on social for a consumer brand: a TikTok of someone eating beer with a spoon and calling it soup outperformed every polished brand post they published. "It has nothing to do with us in some ways," she said. "But that was the one that got two thousand people to repost it."
This isn't a failure of strategy. It's what social has become. If your brand can't afford to produce entertainment at scale, or your category doesn't lend itself to it, the math on brand-level national social stops adding up. Zack put it plainly: "I think it's really, really hard for brands based off of how the franchise model is set up to really undertake a corporate-led social strategy unless they outsource it."
What both of them landed on, and what I've seen work, is a local-first social strategy where corporate acts as the center of excellence. You build the infrastructure, you create the systems, you amplify what's working at the local level. You stop trying to win at national brand content and start making it easier for franchisees to win locally. Sometimes that means licensing tools. Sometimes it means a content pipeline that takes what franchisees are already producing and redistributes it across paid, owned, and email, which is exactly what I built for one brand that had franchisees who were already creating content but only dropping it in one channel.
The thing Ashley flagged that I don't think gets enough attention: social's role in indexing and AI-powered search means you can't fully abandon it even when the engagement ROI feels thin. "You can't completely let it go," she said. "People aren't going to it and using it for education, but it's then gonna help with your search." So the question isn't whether to maintain a social presence. It's whether you're building a strategy that accounts for both the entertainment reality and the discoverability necessity.
PR had a rough decade. GEO just rescued it.
Zack was candid about where PR has been: "It was getting dark there for a little while." The collapse of the news industry, the shrinking of editorial teams, the erosion of traditional media relations — all of it made PR increasingly hard to sell internally and increasingly hard to measure.
GEO changed that. Generative engine optimization, meaning how your brand appears in AI-powered search results, depends heavily on the same things PR has always produced: authoritative third-party coverage, backlinking, and consistent brand narrative across credible external sources. Suddenly there's a spreadsheet version of PR performance that a board can read. "That has made our lives a lot easier," Zack said. "It's a lot more palatable for a board of directors who doesn't know marketing at all."
Ashley made a point I think more marketing teams need to hear: the chase for the big national placement often produces less actual value than the local franchisee story that gets a few hundred targeted readers through the door. "People celebrate something that nobody actually read or cares about and overlook that little local franchisee piece that actually could have driven traffic." The editorial high of a national placement is real. The revenue contribution often isn't.
The strategic frame I walked away with: PR is no longer just a brand awareness play sitting above the funnel. It's a connector. It feeds SEO, it feeds GEO, and it fuels organic discovery across all of your owned properties. That reframe is worth taking into your 2027 budget conversation.
Email is still worth it. But only if you're willing to do it right.
I said something on this episode I'll stand behind: I think AI is coming for email inboxes. Not in the next quarter, but in the next budget cycle or two, the infrastructure for AI to read, filter, and summarize email on a consumer's behalf is real and it's building. If your email program relies on mass blasts getting eyeballs, that era has an expiration date.
But here's what extends the life of your email program significantly: personalization that goes deep enough that even an AI reading it would surface it as relevant. Ashley is rebuilding her entire email architecture from scratch, not layering on top of the old program but starting clean, to get to true behavioral segmentation. If you always order burgers, she's not going to talk to you about kids eat free Wednesday. If you come in every Wednesday, she knows you probably have kids.
Zack's framing on email was sharp: "I want something that people are reading in my emails that they can't find anywhere else, or it would take them a lot of work to find if they were to do it on their own." That's the bar. Not open rates. Not click-through benchmarks. Content value that justifies the inbox space.
He also floated email as a paid media channel, essentially treating your list the way you'd treat a direct mail list, which I think is genuinely underexplored in franchise marketing. The economics are more efficient than direct mail, and if you're targeting the right audience with the right message, the brand impression alone has value.
The thing both of them said that I keep thinking about.
Ashley said stop chasing shiny objects. Zack said stop bringing problems to leadership without solutions. These sound like different things but they're actually the same diagnosis: franchise marketing teams that don't have a clear strategic spine get pushed and pulled by every new trend, every founder who heard something at a conference, every vendor promising a silver bullet.
The brands that are going to win in 2027 are the ones that make strategic decisions about which channels they're actually going to invest in, not spread thin across all of them, and then build the infrastructure to do those well.
Which of your three channels, PR, email, or social, is actually built for what you're trying to accomplish? And when's the last time you asked that question honestly?
This post was inspired by a conversation with Ashley Mitchell, VP of Marketing, East Coast Wings and Grill, and Zack Fishman, Partner, Fishman PR and Franchise Supplier Network, recorded for the Franchise Marketing Spotlight. Listen to the full conversation at https://youtu.be/h74OsOKw63k
