Location of Franchise Networks in the United States. What Lessons for Networks Strategies?

We present in this paper, an exploratory approach to analyzing the network’s location choices. First, adopting a multivariate statistical approach, we built a typology of franchise networks allowing to define latent strategies. . Then, we present a new indicator, Network Linear Density (NLD) to estimate the distribution of network density from the number of outlets and the spatial distance between the franchisors and the largest state. . We conduct this exploratory analysis on a sample of American franchise networks. Our results support the hypothesis that there is a link between overall franchise network strategy and location strategy