Currito? Don't You Mean Boloco?

Yesterday, during an impromptu trip to Logan Airport my girlfriend an I stumbled upon what we thought for sure was a Boloco. However, despite sharing a menu, branding and even bags, we were not at a Boloco. Nor were we in some imagined sitcom knockoff: we were in a "Currito".

This pretty much made by brain explode. There was no variation on the menu (at all) and the lettering, font, and all the branding was in line with a Boloco store.

Did Boloco know about this? I mean we were in Logan Airport...this would be a pretty severe oversight on Boloco's part not to notice someone so deliberately diluting their brand. I had to investigate further. So I went home and checked out Currito's website. Wow, they knocked that off Boloco too? At this point, I had to investigate further. Had I stumbled upon a corporate war? Was some angry franchise owner deliberately knocking off Boloco?

I turned to the bastion of argument winning and investigative reporting: Google. After a brief search (I simply searched for Currito) I found out from Wikipedia that:

"Late in 2004, still operating as The Wrap, the company sold its franchising rights for the area outside of New England to a group of entrepreneurs, and currently (as of 12-08) have 9 franchised units in 8 states, under the name Currito. While Currito and Boloco still have some like menu items and trade dress left over from the 2 year relationship, the concepts are fully separated and operate independently."¹

Ah, so Boloco had licensed itself and it's branding to a group of entrepreneurs outside of New England to create a new brand. But wait? What was wrong with simply franchising out the Boloco name to those investors? Instances like this happen from time to time in the complicated world of franchising.

Technically, that group of investors own the rights to that property and can thus expand and contract within that model as much as they see fit even though their relationship with Boloco had ended.

How can you avoid such painful lessons as a business? Don't franchise alternate versions of your brand. It seems like a good idea at first, you can create scalable versions of your franchise for a variety of markets.

However, what if what happens to Boloco happens to you? You lose your identity to a certain extent through the creation of a knock-off brand. So why start in the first place? You can scale your restaurants accordingly: just make sure that the branding you create stays intact and the basic culture of your product endures.

Otherwise, you will have various Curritos running around...confusing the heck out of everybody.

¹Boloco. (2009, March 20). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 14:57, March 30, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Boloco&oldid=278470892

tagged as bad franchise, bolocco, bolocco branding, currito, currito branding, franchise branding, franchise branding oops, knock off franchise, Marketing