Exploring Franchising business on Wikipedia

Recently, franchising is a common phenomenon and a lot of wholesalers and retailers adopted it as a way to remain competitive in the market (Shane, 1996). Businesses ranging from small street vendor to large multi-national group corporation are franchised. Witnessing the success of various franchises, my friend raised the idea of joining the “Yi diandian” bubble tea franchise and open the first “Yi diandian” bubble tea shop in Melbourne, Australia, where they are a lot of bubble tea enthusiasts. At first, he was thinking of having his own bubble tea brand since he wanted to create more room for creativity in receipt as well as operation methods. However, later he realized, as he is inexperienced in running a business, buying a franchise might a better choice. He is now doing the further research about this franchise business and it inspires my curiosity about franchising in terms of its operation pattern, upside potential and so on. In this paper, I will describe in what way I selected and ordered the pages. Moreover, I will describe some interesting observations I have found in the output outcome, and brief insight will be provided to explain those observations.

The majority of the franchise brands can be categorized into four fields: food, accommodation, clothing and service. I specifically focus on the fast food chain restaurants, hotels, fashion retailers and a variety of services such as logistics and travel arrangements. As I want to see if certain observations only exist due to the geography, I also added some franchise brands mainly based in Asian countries at the latter part of the code to compare them with the western-based franchise brands. From 1 to 51, those are the franchise brands originated and developed in western countries, mainly U.S., while between 52 and 63 are the Asian franchise brands. Dividing western brands from eastern brands, I ordered the pages based on the category, which might be clearer when doing the further analysis.

There are some interesting patterns when observing the data generated from the code. First of all, as for most pages, the uploaded image (the first image) of those pages is the trademark of the franchise, whereas, the first image of franchises like Domino’s Pizza, Taco del Mar and Jinjiang Hotel is the photo of the shop. In addition, there are some franchise brands that do not have pictures in their Wikipedia pages. One of the possible reasons is that the franchise is so new that does not have a lot of information available online. For example, Instant Tax service, a tax preparation service company, was founded in 2000 and it only started franchising since 2004. It is a relatively short period of time that the company is not able to dramatically expand its influence. Thus, the general public would be less likely to purposely take a photo of the shop or upload its trade mark to its Wikipedia page. Additionally, some franchises only popular in the local areas but not internationally, which can also be a possible reason why there is no photo available for the franchise on its Wikipedia page. One of the examples is the Japanese restaurant chain, Kura, which has more than 300 locations in Japan but very few outside Japan.

Moreover, the length of some selected pages’ first paragraphs increased over the early years and decreased in recently few years. For instance, in 2004, the first paragraph in Muji’s Wikipedia page was very short. The reason of this might be that Muji was not known by a lot of people as it only has few franchise shops, which can also be proved by its number of characters and sections. The paragraph became much longer since 2005, in which the specialty of Muji and what product it sells are briefly talked about. The length and the content of the first paragraph did not change a lot between 2005 and 2007. However, starting from 2008, the content of the first paragraph was reduced to only the name and the industry Muji belongs to. It remains exactly same for the next ten years. When i found Muji’s Wikipedia page in 2018, there is a separate paragraph for its special features and a separate section for its business and products. Compared to the page in 2005, 2018’s page is more comprehensive and the structure is more clear.

Apart from image and first paragraph, top words also give the information about the change, tendency or creation of the brand. In McDonald’s Wikipedia page, since 2008, the word “environmental” remains in the list which suggests that the public started to realize the environmental problems brought by the popularity of this fast food chain. As McDonald’s became more and more prevalent especially among the children, the consumption of beef increased dramatically. Farmers damage the rainforest for raising the cattle and it also accelerates the global warming resulting from the increasing greenhouse gas emission. In response, McDonald’s claimed that they will try to minimize their negative impact on the environment, and they published the “Environmental Responsibility” and promised that they will take it into action. Over the last few years, the pubic stays focus on this issue and therefore the word “environmental” appears in the McDonald’s Wikipedia wage at a high frequency. In addition, SF express is another example that can manifest how informative the top words are. In 2014, SF Express launched at least 500 “heike” outlets, which is an online shopping service community store, across China. This was a relatively new selling mode and whether it would be successful or not was controversial. Over the next two years, the word “heike” stayed on the top words list showing the public’s attention of this new creation by SF express.

Lastly, in most clusters, it is simple to identify the common feature of different franchise brands in the same clusters. For instance, cluster 1 successfully identified all the fashion retailers and cluster 4 contains all dry-cleaning franchise brands. However, there is one weird cluster that should be mentioned. Cluster 0 contains a large number of pages that do not have an obvious common feature. It cannot be categorized as the western franchise business because of Kura(restaurant) and it is not fast food chain stores as there are some hotel and service chain stores in the cluster. In addition, in cluster 2, all the pages are related to one type of accommodation – Inn. However, it is confusing why “7 Days Inn” is not included in this cluster. It is understandable that “7 Days Inn” could also fit into cluster 6, in which all the pages have the feature of Asian franchise, but it would be more logical to put it in cluster 2.

In conclusion, by comparing the data between different pages or the data from same page but in different years, we can observe a series of interesting patterns. Although sometimes it is hard to tell the reason why some pages are put into the same cluster, most clusters are grouped in a way that make sense. Meanwhile, the analysis might be a bit biased since the number of the pages contained is relatively small. Further proof is needed with a larger pool of study objects.