A New Exploratory Research on Franchisor's Provision of Exclusive Territories

가맹본부의 배타적 영업지역보호에 대한 탐색적 연구

In franchise business, exclusive sales territory (sometimes EST in table) protection is a very important issue from an economic, social and political point of view. It affects the growth and survival of both franchisor and franchisee and often raises issues of social and political conflicts. When franchisee is not familiar with related laws and regulations, franchisor has high chance to utilize it. Exclusive sales territory protection by the manufacturer and distributors (wholesalers or retailers) means sales area restriction by which only certain distributors have right to sell products or services. The distributor, who has been granted exclusive sales territories, can protect its own territory, whereas he may be prohibited from entering in other regions. Even though exclusive sales territory is a quite critical problem in franchise business, there is not much rigorous research about the reason, results, evaluation, and future direction based on empirical data. This paper tries to address this problem not only from logical and nomological validity, but from empirical validation. While we purse an empirical analysis, we take into account the difficulties of real data collection and statistical analysis techniques. We use a set of disclosure document data collected by Korea Fair Trade Commission, instead of conventional survey method which is usually criticized for its measurement error. Existing theories about exclusive sales territory can be summarized into two groups as shown in the table below. The first one is about the effectiveness of exclusive sales territory from both franchisor and franchisee point of view. In fact, output of exclusive sales territory can be positive for franchisors but negative for franchisees. Also, it can be positive in terms of sales but negative in terms of profit. Therefore, variables and viewpoints should be set properly. The other one is about the motive or reason why exclusive sales territory is protected. The reasons can be classified into four groups - industry characteristics, franchise systems characteristics, capability to maintain exclusive sales territory, and strategic decision. Within four groups of reasons, there are more specific variables and theories as below. Based on these theories, we develop nine hypotheses which are briefly shown in the last table below with the results. In order to validate the hypothesis, data is collected from government (FTC) homepage which is open source. The sample consists of 1,896 franchisors and it contains about three year operation data, from 2006 to 2008. Within the samples, 627 have exclusive sales territory protection policy and the one with exclusive sales territory policy is not evenly distributed over 19 representative industries. Additional data are also collected from another government agency homepage, like Statistics Korea. Also, we combine data from various secondary sources to create meaningful variables as shown in the table below. All variables are dichotomized by mean or median split if they are not inherently dichotomized by its definition, since each hypothesis is composed by multiple variables and there is no solid statistical technique to incorporate all these conditions to test the hypotheses. This paper uses a simple chi-square test because hypotheses and theories are built upon quite specific conditions such as industry type, economic condition, company history and various strategic purposes. It is almost impossible to find all those samples to satisfy them and it can't be manipulated in experimental settings. However, more advanced statistical techniques are very good on clean data without exogenous variables, but not good with real complex data. The chi-square test is applied in a way that samples are grouped into four with two criteria, whether they use exclusive sales territory protection or not, and whether they satisfy conditions of each hypothesis. So the proportion of sample franchisors which satisfy conditions and protect exclusive sales territory, does significantly exceed the proportion of samples that satisfy condition and do not protect. In fact, chi-square test is equivalent with the Poisson regression which allows more flexible application. As results, only three hypotheses are accepted. When attitude toward the risk is high so loyalty fee is determined according to sales performance, EST protection makes poor results as expected. And when franchisor protects EST in order to recruit franchisee easily, EST protection makes better results. Also, when EST protection is to improve the efficiency of franchise system as a whole, it shows better performances. High efficiency is achieved as EST prohibits the free riding of franchisee who exploits other's marketing efforts, and it encourages proper investments and distributes franchisee into multiple regions evenly. Other hypotheses are not supported in the results of significance testing. Exclusive sales territory should be protected from proper motives and administered for mutual benefits. Legal restrictions driven by the government agency like FTC could be misused and cause mis-understandings. So there need more careful monitoring on real practices and more rigorous studies by both academicians and practitioners.

가맹사업에 있어 배타적 영업지역보호정책의 문제는 경제학 및 경영학 분야뿐만 아니라 사회 정치적으로 매우 중요한 쟁점이다. 본 연구는 배타적 영업지역과 관련한 기존 문헌을 토대로 가맹사업에서의 효율성 관점에서 배타적 영업지역보호에 영향을 미치는 변수와 배타적 영업지역 보호가 가맹본부 및 가맹점의 성과에 미치는 영향을 분석하고 있다. 가맹점의 대부분이 중소상인들이란 점을 감안하면 유통정책적으로도 중요한 의미가 있다고 할 수 있다. 본연구는 사회적으로도 잇슈가 될 수 있는 기업의 전략을 타당성과 당위성, 그리고 논리성으로만 평가하는 것이 아니라 실제 자료를 근거로 분석하였다. 또, 정책연구들이 가지고 있는 자료와 이론의 한계를 감안한 탐색적 방법론을 활용하여 보다 실질적이고 현실적용성이 뛰어난 분석을 제안하였다. 분석 결과, 배타적 영업지역보호는 긍정적인 효과가 있기는 하지만 통계적으로 유의하지 못하였으며, 가맹점과 가맹본부간의 로얄티가 많아서 위험공유성향이 클때에는 배타적 영업지역보호를 하지 않는 것이 효과적이었고, 가맹점을 모집하기 위해 배타적 영업지역보호를 해주거나 배타적 영업지역보호를 통해서 가맹사업본부내의 효율성을 키우기 위한 경우에는 긍정적인 효과가 유의하게 나타나는 것으로 밝혀졌다. 하지만 외부경쟁으로부터 직영점을 보호하기 위하거나 시장성장을 활용하기 위한 배타적 영업지역보호는 좋은 성과를 내지 못하였다. 또한 쉽게 배타적 영업지역보호를 할 수 있기에 이런 제도를 도입하는 것도 역시 좋은 성과를 내지 못한 것으로 나타났다. 결과적으로 배타적 영업지역보호가 기업의 운영효율을 증대시키기 위하여 하는 경우는 성과가 좋으나 다른 목적을 위하여 배타적 영업지역보호를 활용하는 것은 바람직한 결과를 못내는 것으로 나타났다. 본 연구는 분석결과를 토대로 영업지역 보호를 획일적으로 활용하거나 법으로 강제하기 보다는 가맹사업본부와 가맹점의 관계 및 상황, 또 동기에 맞추어 탄력적으로 적용하는 것이 바람직하다는 제안을 하고 있으며, 이를 근거로 몇 가지 정책적 시사점을 제시하였다.