The Platform Adoption Curve: Solving Problems Brands Learn to Live With
Some of the biggest opportunities for new technology platforms come from solving problems businesses have learned to live with. For multi-location brands, fragmented local marketing processes, disconnected vendors and limited visibility into spending have become accepted operating practices, but what happens when a platform makes those inefficiencies unnecessary?
The most valuable business platforms often solve problems that companies don’t initially realize they have.
That sounds counterintuitive. If a problem were significant enough to justify an entirely new technology platform, shouldn’t businesses already be looking for a solution?
Not necessarily. In many industries, inefficient processes become so ingrained that they stop looking inefficient. Spreadsheets get passed around. Vendors operate independently. Employees develop workarounds. The work gets done, and because it gets done, the process rarely gets questioned. Then a new platform enters and proposes a different way of doing things. That’s where an interesting adoption cycle begins.
Awareness Comes Before Infrastructure
When a platform enters an established category like CRM or project management, buyers already understand the problem; the conversation is about which platform solves it best. But when technology defines a new category, a company first must recognize the problem before it can evaluate any solution. That makes these platforms’ real competitor the status quo, not other vendors, and the status quo is remarkably resilient. The natural question is “why do we need another platform?” The better one is “what becomes possible once these disconnected activities are connected?”
Most successful platforms start by solving a straightforward problem: a CRM organizes customer relationships, a project management tool organizes work, and the first benefit is efficiency. But as adoption grows, platforms create something more valuable: structure. Information once scattered across emails, spreadsheets, and individual employees’ heads becomes centralized. Only then can a business ask what it couldn’t easily answer before: What’s happening? What’s working? How does one location or team compare with another? That’s the moment a platform stops being a tool and becomes infrastructure.
Local Marketing Is Entering This Stage
Local marketing is a clear example. Most multi-location brands run on sophisticated technology for point-of-sale, loyalty, digital advertising, and reputation management. Yet local marketing still operates differently from brand to brand: a franchisee sponsors a school, another buys local digital ads, another runs a direct-mail piece, and the information behind that activity lives everywhere: emails, spreadsheets, vendor invoices, franchisee submissions, or nowhere at all.
The activity itself isn’t a problem. The lack of a system connecting it is, and that’s not a hunch; it shows up in the data. In the 2025 Annual Franchise Marketing Report from Franchise Update Media, 85% of franchise brands require or recommend local marketing spend by their locations. But among those same brands, only 46% require any documentation of what was spent, and 48% run entirely on an honor system with no reporting at all. That’s not a franchisee compliance failure. It’s a visibility gap, exactly what a connecting platform exists to close.
From Feature to Ecosystem
Early conversations about a new platform category tend to focus on individual features: can I order through it, can I track spend, can I see results? Fair questions, but they miss the larger opportunity: the real value isn’t any one feature; it’s what happens once execution, spending, performance, and business results live in the same system.
That’s what we’re seeing firsthand with LOMA, a platform built specifically around local marketing for multi-location brands like Orange Theory, Anytime Fitness, Nekter and Yogurtland. The original problem looks simple: brands lack visibility into local activity, but once that activity is captured consistently, more opens up: approved tactics become easier to access, performance can be benchmarked, and marketing activity can connect to real business data like transactions and sales. The conversation shifts from “are our locations doing local marketing?” to “what are we doing, what’s it costing, and what’s it producing?” That’s a fundamentally different conversation.
Why Adoption Compounds
Platforms get interesting when participation itself makes them more valuable. One location reporting activity creates visibility; then create comparison; a hundred start creating benchmarks revealing which tactics perform, which markets underinvest, and what correlates with real transactions. Right now, the 48% of brands running local marketing on the honor system can’t ask any of those questions with real data; they’re comparing impressions, not evidence. More adoption creates more data, more data creates better decisions, and better decisions drive more adoption – the loop that turns anecdote into pattern.
From Skepticism to Indispensable
Customer understanding follows its own curve: “Why do I need this?” becomes “This makes the process easier,” then “I didn’t realize how much we weren’t seeing.” That shift only happens if the platform removes friction rather than adding it — if entering data or ordering a tactic is harder than emailing a vendor, people simply revert to the old way. The best platforms become the easiest way to do the task, and that’s when behavior changes.
Once it does, a threshold gets crossed: the platform stops being justified and becomes part of how the business runs, the way no modern sales team would trade its CRM back for spreadsheets. Local marketing is approaching that same transition, not because the activity is new, but because connecting its execution, spend, and business impact in one system finally is. The clearest sign a platform has arrived is when people stop asking “why do we need this?” and start asking, “how did we ever do this without it?”
