Franchise restaurants have long tried to drum up business on the local level with newspaper ads and with mass mailings of coupons and other promotional offers.
But now franchisers have a host of new ways to drive business to individual stores, thanks largely to the explosion in recent years of technologies that recognize a user's location.
Among others: Burger King Holdings Inc. is test-marketing an iPhone application that helps users find its restaurants and view local deals, and Quizno's Corp. and Applebee's International Inc. are readying similar apps.
Mooyah, a regional burger franchise in Texas, is offering location-specific giveaways and specials to its followers on Twitter, while Papa Murphy's International Inc., a pizza franchise based in Vancouver, Wash., with restaurants across the country, plans to offer location-specific deals to customers nationwide by using technology that recognizes the whereabouts of visitors to the company's website.
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