Evelien Croonen and co-authors win ISOF Best Paper Award

Assistant professor Evelien Croonen and co-authors have won the Best Paper Award at the conference of the International Society of Franchising (ISOF), which was held in Rennes, France in June. They received the award for their paper titled “Antecedents and consequences of franchisee trust in their franchise consultants’’.

Evelien Croonen is an assistant professor at FEB’s Department of Innovation Management and Strategy  (IM&S) and visiting professor at the University of Rennes. The co-authors of the award-winning paper are Rozenn Perrigot (University of Rennes), Eszter Gedeon (University of South Brittany) and Hamid Mazloomi (Rennes School of Business). 

Studying franchisee-consultant relationships

Franchising is an important business strategy in many industries and world regions. In business format franchising, a franchisor enters into contractual relationships with franchisees - typically small business owners - who pay for the right to use the franchisor's business format - comprising a uniform identity in the market and internal procedures - and who agree to conform to the franchisor's standards.

Despite the existence of an extensive amount of research on antecedents and consequences of trust in franchisee-franchisor relationships, previous has neglected the role of ‘corporate franchise consultants’ as a specific party in building trust in franchisee-franchisor relationships. This lack of research is surprising and undesirable because such consultants are employees of the franchisor organization who fulfill multiple important roles in franchisor-franchisee relationship management.

 In their paper, Croonen, Perrigot, Gedeon and Mazloomi use an in-depth case study of franchisee-consultant relationships within one Western European franchise network to generate insights into the antecedents and consequences of franchisee trust in their consultants.  Their findings point at three types of antecedents of franchisee trust in their consultants: consultant role fulfillment, franchisee-consultant interactions and clan culture. Moreover, their study hints at two types of consequences of franchisee trust in their consultants: franchisee compliance and unit performance. The study takes an important step in research on franchisee-franchisor relationship quality - and more specifically micro-level processes affecting franchisee trust and their outcomes - by delving into the relationships of franchisees with corporate franchise consultants as a specific type of franchisor representative.

About Evelien Croonen

Evelien Croonen is currently involved in several studies regarding strategy and management of franchise networks and performance of franchise networks and franchisees. She works with franchisors and franchisees from different industries, such as supermarkets, department stores, fast food and sports. The questions she aims to answer with her research are how franchisors and franchisees can successfully organize their franchise relationships and franchise networks, how franchise partners can successfully deal with strategy, innovation and strategic change in their franchise networks and how franchisors and franchisees can create mutual trust. Croonen studies both franchisors’ and franchisees’ perspectives, as franchising can only be successful if both franchise partners are successful. In her projects, she cooperates with several colleagues from different departments within FEB, but also with colleagues from universities in France, the United States, Austria, and the United Kingdom.

More information

If you are interested to read the complete paper, or have other questions about the research, please contact Evelien Croonen.