Every new Applebee's location starts with the same challenge: building buzz in a new neighborhood before the doors open. Franchisees needed a ready-made toolkit they could launch quickly, without a designer on hand and without drifting from the brand. I designed a system of pre-opening marketing templates built to be easy to localize: swap in the city, the date and the offer, and the brand stays intact. Templates work best when they constrain the right things, so I locked the brand's essentials and left room where each location needed its own voice.