Blue MauMau Says Interest in Franchising is Dropping. Oh Really?
According to a recent post in “The-Franchising-Glass-Is-Half-Empty” Blue MauMau, enquiries about franchising have been trending downwards for years and this, Blue Mau Mau suggests, means that all the people who have been saying that there has been a surge in the interest in franchising since the economy took a dive around, let’s say, October 2008 are just whistling to keep their courage up.
Here is a quote from a post in their forum:
“There are many anecdotal stories of record numbers of out of work employees kicking the tires of different franchise brands in looking for a new career as a franchise owners. Other stories talk about record number of businesses looking at tapping into franchising to provide expansion funds during the credit crunch. But Google tells a different story.”
And they back it up with the graph from Google, shown here.
The broader inference that Blue MauMau is making is that the franchising movement is riven with gypsies, tramps and theives and most people who are wanting to get into their own business have finally woken up to the fact that to buy into a franchise is to set off down the road to financial ruin.
This negativity doesn’t sit well with me and it certainly isn’t my experience that interest in franchising is on the wane. One look at the enquiries coming in to Every Franchise and my server logs tell a completely different story.
So I thought about it for a bit. The first problem I saw with the BMM post was the search term. I mean who would really do a Google search for “franchising”? If you were looking for a franchise to get into wouldn’t you couple the “F” word with the segment you were interested in? Such as “automotive franchise” or “franchise opportunities”.
So using Google Trends, I ran an inquiry for “franchise opportunities” and received a very different chart to the one Blue MauMau displays.
You will notice the sudden spike late last year and notice too that the upward trend is still continuing to this date. Notice also the graph below. Blue Mau Mau cut it off their example, because I guess it contradicted the thrust of their blog post. That graph is of the volume of news references containing the same search term. It shows a steady increase from when the Google service started in 2004.
I also reckon BMM did a subtle compression of the graph along the X Axis to exaggerate the decline. Oh the shenanigans!
Blue Mau Mau is partly right, as up until October last year there was a gradual decline in searches for “franchise opportunities”. My guess is that during this time the economy seemed to be doing well, jobs were easy to get (bonuses were good!), and there wasn’t quite the incentive to take the plunge of starting one’s own business.
But Blue MauMau is patently wrong in contending that there is not a recent increase in numbers of people looking at buying into a franchise.
So watch out for grumpy old men who tell you the sky is falling, I just wish they’d stop it ‘cos every time BMM publishes a negative post, my arthritis flares up.
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