Most marketers answer to one audience. Rhianna Clavering answers to two at the same time, and they don’t always want the same thing.
As National Marketing Manager at Caremark, a leading home care franchise across the UK and Ireland, she has to win over the families choosing care for a loved one and the franchise owners who deliver it. In this episode of the Franchise Whispering podcast, host Bob McKay sits down with her to unpack what that actually takes. Her path there was anything but typical, and the lessons she’s picked up apply well beyond home care.
Rhianna didn’t arrive in franchising by the obvious route. She built her marketing skills in sectors as different as music and pest control before landing in home care, and she treats that range as an asset rather than a detour. Franchising, she argues, rewards people who can read three things at once: performance (the numbers), people (the owners and customers behind them), and pace (how fast the whole thing is changing).
That breadth matters because the stakes are real. At Caremark she steers a seven-figure National Marketing Fund, and every pound has to pull double duty: attracting new franchisees to the network and generating customers for the owners already in it. Spend it well and the whole network grows. Spend it carelessly and you’ve let down dozens of business owners who trusted you with their money.
Here’s the idea that reframes everything else: in home care, you are not selling a product. You are selling trust.
A retail brand can lead with a discount and a countdown timer. A home care brand can’t, because the customer is usually a worried adult deciding who gets to look after their aging parent in that parent’s own home. Push too hard and you don’t just lose the sale, you confirm the fear that the company sees a vulnerable person as a transaction. The marketing has to do the opposite: lower anxiety, signal competence and feel human.
Rhianna’s point is that this tone can’t be manufactured by an agency and bolted on at the end. It has to be true inside the network first. Caremark’s marketing is built on strong internal belief and alignment, so that when a franchise owner speaks to a family, they’re not reciting a brand line, they actually mean it. The caregiver at the door ends up being the most important piece of marketing the brand has.
Ask Rhianna who succeeds in a franchise network and the answer isn’t “the ones who follow the playbook most obediently.” It’s the ones who engage.
The strongest owners treat the relationship as two-way. They tell the head office what’s landing in their local market and what’s falling flat, and that feedback becomes the raw material for better campaigns. A national message that tests well in a boardroom might miss completely in a particular town, and the only people who know that are the owners on the ground. When that intelligence flows back up, the franchisor can adjust quickly and serve local markets far better than any central team guessing from a spreadsheet.
The deeper skill, she notes, is recognizing that different audiences need genuinely different conversations. The pitch that excites a prospective franchisee (growth, opportunity, support) is not the message that reassures an anxious family, and neither is the message that keeps an existing owner feeling backed. Trust gets built by speaking to each of them in their own terms, not by broadcasting one message at everyone.
A single business coordinates marketing in a few rooms. A franchise has to coordinate it across dozens of independent businesses that share a brand but not a payroll, which makes communication the real infrastructure.
Rhianna leans on open channels and genuine feedback loops to keep the network informed and motivated, using tools like Monday.com to keep everyone coordinated and in the loop. The platform matters less than the principle behind it: owners who can see what’s happening, and who know their input actually goes somewhere, stay engaged. Owners left in the dark quietly tune out, and a disengaged network is a marketing problem no campaign can fix.
Beyond Caremark, Rhianna mentors young marketers through initiatives like Girls in Marketing, and her advice carries a refreshing bluntness: get over the fear of rejection, and look in places you wouldn’t expect.
Franchising is one of those overlooked places. It rarely gets taught as a career path, yet it demands an unusually wide skill set, from brand strategy to local activation, from B2B recruitment to B2C customer marketing, all at once. For someone early in their career, that variety is exactly the appeal: few fields let you stretch so many muscles or put you so close to the point where a marketing decision affects a real person’s life.
The thread running through all of it is simple. Whether she’s reassuring a family, backing a franchise owner or encouraging a nervous young marketer to take the leap, Rhianna Clavering keeps coming back to the same thing: marketing works when it’s built on real human connection, not performed at people from a distance.
For the full conversation, including the parts of her story that don’t fit in a recap, listen to the complete episode of the Franchise Whispering podcast.
