Franchising Relationship: Malaysian Franchisees’ Perspectives

Abstract

Nowadays, when entrepreneurs wish to expand their businesses in either domestic or international markets, they will adopt for franchising. Franchising has become extremely popular in many countries across the world, including Malaysia. It is a business platform that distributes the products and services based on a contract made by a two-party relationship. Even though franchising has been recognized as a rapid platform for business growth, franchisees’ perspective about franchising relationships is an area less explored and less understood. Thus, this study addresses the important aspects in franchising relationship by using the concepts from Agency Theory, Plural Organization Theory and Resource Based View Theory. For the methodological aspect, textual analysis was undertaken across the case of food and beverages industries and education and learning center industries to explore the matter further. The analysis was divided into four themes namely: (i) proven business format; (ii) brand equity of franchising; (iii) franchising cost; and (iv) training and support, to attempt to explain the elements of franchising relationship. The adopted deductive approach has provided rich information that will lead future research by using other methods.